Roger Frampton, fitness expert and male model, discusses Why Sitting Down Destroys You at TEDxLeamingtonSpa conference. Below is the full transcript.
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Roger Frampton – Fitness expert and male model
Thank you. So the other day I was giving a talk to a bunch of young models on having a career in the fashion industry. And I really wanted to tell them about my upcoming TED Talk. So I go, ‘Hey guys, has anyone here heard of TED?” And in typical model fashion, this is the reply I get. “Yeah, I’ve seen them both and the teddy bear is hilarious?” Like what? The youth of today, it made me laugh so much. I mean I can’t really say much.
When I was 15, I wanted to be a bodybuilder, not just any bodybuilder, though, the number one: Arnold Schwarzenegger. I actually remember day one on my attempt to get a body like this guy. There was this local old school gym in East London and it looked like something that you might see in a Rocky movie. It was this converted garage space with ripped black benches, rusting barbells and these posters of ex-bodybuilding champions on the wall, including Schwarzenegger himself as a goal to aspire to.
Now the day I walked in there, I met the owner, this proper Cockney guy called Dave. I described to him my health and fitness goals in great lengthy detail, you know, just like an adolescent kid does. I want to get massive. He nodded. You know, he really understood what I wanted. He pointed the squat rack and he says, “That over there, son, they get big legs and that over there, go into the bench press, they get big chest and these dumb bells for big arms. And that’s the way it goes on”. So if I did go that, I mean it was a pretty simple concept really. If you can get from A to B in eight repetitions you just add more weight.
Now this time in my life I hadn’t yet studied squat science. So little did I know but this A to B method I was using we refer to as overload. Now the overload fairly works like this. If I push my body to failure, meaning I no longer have the capability to do any more repetitions, then when I’m resting my body simply produces more muscle that allows me to lift more next time. I can then work around the body using this method on each muscle group, hey presto, one day you have body like Arnold. Well I obviously do not have a body like Arnie. In fact, I have a body like a fashion model and that’s because I was scouted in the street and was forced to give up on my bodybuilding dream.
So this is one of my first shows. This is me strutting down the catwalk for Calvin Klein. The casting director — thank you – the casting director was backstage before the show, teaching us how to walk in a strong posture: feet straight, deliver an end, shoulders back and down.
But why in my early twenties was I being taught how to walk. More importantly, why did walking this way feel so alien? But yes, on the outside to the audience, it looks quite powerful. I mean all they were asking me to do was walk like I was supposed to walk. So I decided to go to a place where just being in strong posture was common practice. And I was about to meet the person face-to-face that would destroy my aspiration of Schwarzenegger forever.
So I was attempting an exercise called a bridge in our gymnastics class and I just couldn’t get my arm straight, let alone my body off the ground. So the coach called somebody over who demonstrates this movement effortlessly. She was a six-year-old girl. This is actually her. Her name is Grace. Amazing, Grace, how sweet — but what I really began to see is the principles being used in gymnastics class were identical to the posture cues being given backstage during Fashion Week. It’s the language of gymnastics that’s not based on individual muscles but based on the movements of the joints and the skeleton. For example, they use shoulder instead of biceps, triceps, hips, instead of quads hamstrings, completely the opposite to what the fitness industry prioritizes, fitness taught muscles before spine. You see gymnasts focus on how they are moving their body and they also just happen to have awesome posture and a really strong core, it’s really no coincidence. This is a byproduct of working with the body.
In fact, prioritization of the spine is a much smarter approach. If you happen to damage your spinal cord you can actually lose the ability to move any part of your body. And this is something we’ve been reminded of our whole life. Stop slouching, sit up straight and get your core, get your elbows off the table. They all mean the same thing. All your parents were saying was prioritize your spine. You see the thing is as humans we were just born with full range of motion.
Biochemist Esther Gokhale spent time traveling the world and researched places where back pain hardly exists. What she noticed was people’s spines with a flatter lumbar curvature didn’t suffer from back pain. She referred to this as a J-shaped spine and you can see the difference in the images here between the S-shaped spine taught in the Western world and the J-shaped spine in people where back pain doesn’t exist. Gokhale states the J-shaped spine is what you see in Greek statues and in young children universally. What she’s saying is we’re all born with a J-shaped spine.
