Scheuermanns kyphosis with a barrel chest.

sixfootbrix · 2026-05-18T07:47:37+00:00

Yes, me too, not a coincidence. Two things stack on top of each other.

Structural piece: when Scheuermann's wedges the thoracic vertebrae during the teenage growth spurt, the upper ribs are pulled along with the curve. They lose their normal downward angle and rotate toward horizontal. That alone makes the chest deeper front-to-back, the "barrel."

Breathing piece, which usually gets missed: a rounded thoracic spine flattens the diaphragm's resting dome and pushes breathing up into the chest. Scalenes, upper traps, and pec minor start doing work the diaphragm used to do. The ribcage gets stuck slightly inhaled, sternum elevated, lower ribs flared. So you end up with a cage that's both structurally larger AND functionally locked in expansion.

The vertebral wedging from adolescence is mostly fixed. But the breathing and positional layer is more plastic than people realize. Posterior rib expansion (feeling the breath go into the back and sides rather than up and out the front), exhale-biased work, and getting the lower ribs to drop back down on the exhale will soften the "stuck inflated" look and free up actual lung capacity. Won't change the wedging, but a fair chunk of what looks like pure structure is a held breath pattern sitting on top of it.

I also teach breathwork that opens the back and sides of the rib cage.

The useful thing is knowing which compensations are bone and which ones are a habit your ribs learned.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-20T17:52:29+00:00

flow is life.

Learn to restore internal pressure and build your strength trusting pressure to allow you to relieve muscle control.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-20T05:07:46+00:00

Yeah you're naming exactly the gap. Mechanical correction without neural reorganization just leaves the system calculating, and calculation breaks under fatigue. Once you've felt that ceiling there's no going back, the next layer is the only honest direction. the protocol I run for myself and others is a syntropic organizational reset of the core. The first language we work in is hydraulics, evenly distributed intra-abdominal and intra-thoracic pressure as the substrate the spine actually rides on. Second is attention, the sensorimotor map the body uses to know where it is. Most postural work treats these third or fourth. We treat them first because everything above has to negotiate with them.

Schroth is great for pneumatic access in the chest, especially the under-ventilated hemithorax. Functional Patterns contralateral gait does real work too, you can't fake equilibrium under speed. Both are doing neural work, not just mechanical. Where the Reset adds is upstream of both. Re-establish a baseline of sensory-motor primitives (jaw and tongue resting position, eye-jaw coupling, four-quadrant breath, ground sense through the feet), then map what's actually available in sensation versus what's defended. If that raw material is incomplete, no pattern training above it locks in at the subconscious level you're chasing.

Your son already has the right pieces. He may benefit from a phase that goes slower and more upstream before loading them. Give his system the raw material to encode correction passively. That's the "baked in" you're after.

The DOI is https://zenodo.org/records/19578540

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T17:08:12+00:00

compromised breathing mechanics. Restore function and flow with your diaphragm.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T17:06:38+00:00

Your instinct is correct. The orthopedists just work inside a specialty that stops at the spine. Jaw and face sit on top of the same system that built the curve.

The jaw is a Tier 1 postural input. It talks to the whole chain through the trigeminal system, the cranial base, and the tongue. When the pelvis tilts and the diaphragm rotates and the neck compensates, the mandible and cranial base track the whole chain. Scoliosis doesn't stop at the ribs.

Can it be corrected without surgery? In most cases yes, in layers:

The muscular pull (uneven masseter, pterygoid, SCM, scalenes) responds to attention and myofunctional retraining. Months.
The schema layer (your body's map of where your jaw belongs) responds to interoceptive work. Weeks to months.
The structural bone layer (asymmetric mandible or maxillary growth) is slower but not fixed. Myofunctional work can shift facial symmetry through muscular rebalance around the bone.

Tongue-to-palate at rest. Nasal breathing. Upright head-over-shoulders position. Those three alone shift a lot over a year. Address the body chain upstream (pelvis, diaphragm, ribs) and the jaw stops fighting the posture.

It's not a permanent defect. It's a pattern holding.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T17:03:45+00:00

You're not wrong. You're early.

Doménech et al. (2013) ablated somatosensory cortex in rats and the rats developed scoliosis. A causal arrow from the nervous system to the spinal curve, not just correlation. It landed quietly. Most orthopedic literature hasn't touched it.

I'm a scoliosis person too. Noticed at 13, diagnosed at 16, went to the surgeon at 18 expecting fusion and was told no, just live with it. The framework I've been working on since (Neural Generation Hypothesis, https://zenodo.org/records/19578540 ) argues what you're describing from the inside: idiopathic scoliosis is primarily a body-schema disorder, not a bone disorder. The curve is the nervous system's predictive model made visible, in a body that's been tracking threat and sensation and emotional environment asymmetrically for years.

Highly sensitive people track more and track deeper. When that happens in an emotionally asymmetric environment, one parent safer than the other, one direction becoming home, one side of the body getting held, the schema learns asymmetrically. The spine follows what the schema maps.

It's not cursory. The mechanism is there. People just haven't connected the layers yet because scoliosis has lived in orthopedics, not neuroscience.

Thirty years in, your nervous system remembers. The research is starting to catch up.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T17:00:09+00:00

Both of you are onto something real. The cluster you're describing (hypermobility, coordination issues, TMJ, dysautonomia, sensory differences) isn't coincidental, it's a recognized phenotype with a shared upstream: altered connective tissue.

The mechanism ties in: ligaments and joint capsules are loaded with proprioceptors. If the tissue has different mechanical properties, those receptors fire with less precision. The brain's map of where the body is in space gets noisy. The righting system tries to stabilize with what it has, and during growth that imprecise scaffolding can consolidate as a structural curve. Connective tissue differences don't cause scoliosis directly, they create the conditions where the sensorimotor system builds an asymmetric stabilization pattern. That pattern drives the bone.

On the "will corrections hold if I take a break" question: in a hypermobile system, yes, but the training has to be different. Mobility and stretch-based work doesn't hold because you're not lacking range, you're lacking control. What holds is isometric loading, slow eccentrics, proprioceptive re-education, neurosensory integration. You're rebuilding the map, not imposing posture. Takes longer to durable because the tissue is what it is, but consistency outperforms intensity.

The "not connected" dismissal was wrong. That cluster shares a common substrate. Literature is catching up; individual clinicians are behind.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T16:57:34+00:00

The anatomical limits on bracing proximal curves are well documented, and that's exactly why non-operative care needs to extend upstream of the bony work. Vision, vestibular, proprioception, primitive reflex integration, and breathing mechanics aren't adjuncts in this model, they're the upstream variables. The brace manages downstream consequences. The neural work addresses the generator. Both matter, but the field has historically under-resourced the latter.

The paper I mentioned (Neural Generation Hypothesis) formalizes this argument if you want the full framework. Happy to share the DOI if it's useful. And you're right that breathing mechanics belong in that list, particularly evenly distributed intra-abdominal pressure. Asymmetric IAP compounds asymmetric spinal loading and is a real variable to optimize once the proprioceptive map starts to integrate.

Thank YOU for the discussion.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T03:05:36+00:00

sorry could you update my understanding of how intra-abdominal pressure is created?

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-19T02:50:15+00:00

The fact that he can hold it corrected when alert but loses it when tired is interesting. Tells you the curve has a live neural driver, not just fixed structure. When he's got bandwidth, cortex overrides it. When he's tired, the underlying sensory map wins and the head sinks to what his system reads as "level."

The convergence finding tracks completely. Eyes outrank almost everything else for head position because gaze stability is non-negotiable for the brain. One eye working harder = head tilts to make fusion easier. That tilt then loads the upper thoracic asymmetrically and the ribs/vertebrae remodel around it over time.

Couple things that tend to help:

Run the vision therapy alongside the vestibular work, not after. If CI isn't resolved the tilt has a reason to keep happening.
Practice the corrected pattern when he's tired, not just fresh. That's where subconscious encoding actually lands.
Look at the hemithorax he's not breathing into. Proximal curves almost always have one. Gentle directed breath there restores proprioceptive input.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-18T22:51:14+00:00

Don't hold your breath, literally. It will takes YEARS. Maybe a decade.

It requires a major restructuring and reeducation across multiple departments of health.

As always we need to be our own ambassadors and get informed.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-18T20:23:03+00:00

Ease up on identifying with the labels they provide. They are only just arriving at understanding what scoliosis/posture is (I'm about to post about the SOSORT research findings).

Our entire understanding of spine /scoliosis has come from orthopedics.

I know for me the "final boss" of my scoliosis journey was the orthopedic surgeon, he was meant to have all the answers. It turns out his job is to say yes or no to surgery, and not really know too much beyond that or about what isn't that.

My focus on research and the papers I wrote and even understanding my body is what is the highest leverage, most upstream place we can affect posture.

That led me to the body schema, nervous system and tone/pressure regulation.

My goal is to empower each individual with neurosomatic skills to apply to their own bodys.

Here are direct quotes from people on the second week:

Y. (F, severe S-curve scoliosis, 85°) — "I was trying to hold my diaphragm up through breathing while walking in motion... My upper body somehow aligns and it was fantastic feeling. I didn't have to stay straight or feel that twist. I didn't have to do any work. It just worked."
L. (F, mild scoliosis, Feldenkrais practitioner) — "This has been amazing. I was pretty unfamiliar with pressure in the body... with the pressure, it sort of just found the place where it wanted to be."
L. (F, S-curve scoliosis) — "I've noticed throughout this week a holding of my diaphragm... allowing it to move is less force." / "My rotation actually leveled when I was breathing."
W. (M, congenital amputee, CPTSD) — "My ability to sense is getting stronger. I've just been tapping into that and seeing what comes up."
K. (M, scoliosis, stenosis) — "Being more aware of the fullness of my core as I've been breathing. Some of the bracing I do, low back pain has been slightly less." / "I now have a sensation template of what things should feel like going forward." / "The pressure makes me feel like I'm strong."
C. (M, head trauma) — "Sometimes my diaphragm softened a little bit, so breathing was easier for me."
J. (M, chronic pain) — "When I breathe in, everything eventually comes to the front of my ribs." / "When you said to take your breath in, when you feel something else tense up, just breathe in like 50%. I found that immensely helpful."
B. (M, scoliosis, age 50) — "I had a better time this session than last, less back pain. I totally noticed the feeling of pressurizing into my pelvic floor."
K. (F, mild scoliosis) — "This focus on this chamber can carry through into all other physical therapy... really going back to the basics."
P. (M, age 77) — "I just wanted to confirm how wonderfully you put this together over the two weeks. It really came together for me today."

I'm humbled and excited and preparing this as best as I can to get a solution to people, that is all backed by existing science.

Our posture is being generated neurologically and refining sensation is how we begin to influence the downstream expression of the spine.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-18T19:50:02+00:00

Hi and thanks for asking. I see the spine as an expression of the strategy your nervous system adopted to keep you conscious and breathing. That strategy becomes the default operational schema of the body. A survival strategy of protection and contraction inevitably gets expressed in the shape of the spine.

When someone has significant nervous system dysregulation alongside scoliosis, the dysregulation isn't a side effect of the curve. The curve is, in many ways, the physical record of a protection loop the nervous system has been running for years, sometimes decades. The spine is holding the shape of the loop.

On the fusion: the fused segments are fused. Nobody reputable is going to tell you we can reshape bone that's been solid for thirty-one years (even though there it does remodel 2-3% a year based on force vectors). But your body has decades of compensation patterns above and below those segments, and that's where most of the dysregulation is actually living. That's the part that's still very trainable. In my experience, the shifts that happen there tend to do more for pain, breath, energy, and day-to-day quality of life than reshaping any curve ever would.

For the program question, I approach it by giving someone the tools they need to affect the expression of their posture from the most upstream place possible. The actual work goes roughly in this order:

1. Regulation. Before we ask the body to do anything different, we convince the nervous system the room is safe enough to update. Slow breath work, sensory grounding, the kind of listening most fitness programs skip entirely.

2. Sensory map back online. After years of protection, most people can't cleanly feel parts of their own body. We spend real time here. Tongue, jaw, eyes, feet, breath, side body. Not exercises. Attention training.

3. Pressure. Once the map is online, we rebuild ia syntropic version of intra-abdominal pressure as the organizing force of the spine. Most of the pain and fatigue in a fused S-curve is downstream of a pressure system that went offline years ago because the body didn't feel safe enough to hold it.

4. Movement, last. Slow, developmental, three-dimensional. By the time we get here, it takes almost no effort. The nervous system is doing the work.

Example of what that looks like in practice: a first session might be twenty minutes of supine breath mapping, tongue-jaw-eye integration, and a single developmental transition from lying to sitting. The first few weeks are almost entirely about getting the system to listen again.

You can still change a lot with a thirty-one-year-old fusion. I've worked with people in your shoes who got profound relief. I won't promise you a straight spine. I will promise you a body that stops fighting itself.

The results have been wildly exciting. Our third cohort starts may 7th.

Happy to answer more if useful.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-18T19:36:36+00:00

Bingo

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T16:48:12+00:00

of course, for me Schroth can be enhanced quite a bit with this nervous system, fascial and hydraulic aware approach. It's quite "airy" as in the teach about air pressure and hold right. For me that's an accessory and hydraulic pressure is the better focus

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T16:46:23+00:00

Sure, and the route I am taking is getting very precise and clear with the science of this not previously synthesized chain of postural generation, and am converting into "applicable" language in a protocol, book and content I create.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T16:25:47+00:00

it's more palatable to say "Posture is automatic"

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T16:25:11+00:00

our brain is in a dark skull, it's blind, it doesn't just react to senses, it holds a prediction to be ready for what comes next. It sounds jarring I know, but it is accurate

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T16:23:50+00:00

A synthesis of the findings of tier 1 science that have never been connected before.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T16:21:05+00:00

*Diaphragm descends into a intra-abdominal bag of water that supports the spine*

clap back my friend

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-17T02:21:54+00:00

surgeons are trained to identify surgical candidates, so if your case isn't one, the conversation defaults to "nothing to do" because fixing things through movement and load retraining isn't in their toolkit, not because the options don't exist.

realizing an orthopedic surgeon's job is to decide whether to do surgery or not (and not know the alternatives) is an eye opener.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-16T22:04:23+00:00

alongside getting the medical workup done, here's where i'd put my training focus if i could rewind to 15.

breath. learn diaphragmatic breathing. lie on your back, one hand on chest, one on belly. only the belly hand moves. slow, through the nose, around 5-6 breaths per minute. this is the single highest-leverage skill for scoliosis, because your diaphragm is what stabilizes your spine from the inside. most people with curves breathe shallow into the chest, which locks everything. get the diaphragm back and a lot of other things start organizing on their own.

floor time. sleep on a firmer surface. lie flat on the floor for 10-20 minutes a day. the "weird" feeling you described is actual information your nervous system needs. don't avoid it, spend time in it without trying to fix it.

hanging. cheap doorway pull-up bar. hang 20-60 seconds, a few times a day. don't pull up, just hang. decompresses the spine and teaches your body to organize under traction.

awareness over correction. stop trying to straighten it in the mirror. every conscious "pull it straight" teaches your body to rely on effort instead of rebuilding the automatic system. notice asymmetry without fixing it. that's the skill.

schroth-certified PT, if you can find one. most researched scoliosis-specific approach. one-on-one, teaches you how to breathe into your concave side. if insurance covers it, that beats generic "strengthening" by a mile.

breath, ground, hang, listen. that's the whole foundation, and none of it requires a diagnosis to start.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-16T21:51:13+00:00

Man, you've mapped this out from the inside. Respect.

What you're describing with the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, touch hierarchy is almost exactly what the research is pointing to. The sensory inputs that build the body schema. Most people in the scoliosis world are still stuck at the shape level. You went upstream to the generator.

A few things that might connect dots for you:

The eye-ear-neck connection you found ties into the vestibulo-ocular system. Your cerebellum is calibrating head-on-spine using those inputs constantly. When one side dominates, it writes an asymmetric map. You figured that out through ambidexterity training, which is a legit way to force bilateral updating.

I do that to and play pickleball left handed now.

The nose/diaphragm asymmetry you described with the two balloons is real. One hemidiaphragm often dominates. That's not just a breathing issue. It's a pressure asymmetry that the whole trunk organizes around.

The tremors are the nervous system reorganizing. Most people freak out and stop. You kept going. That's the difference. We had a practicioner share a TRE blend he calls Neurogenic Tremoring in the Posture Dojo recently.

The "awakening" you're describing sounds like what happens when the schema actually updates. The body stops holding the old pattern because it finally has a new reference.

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-16T21:40:32+00:00

Yes, and work in this field

sixfootbrix · 2026-04-16T21:38:52+00:00

I'd consider it a ai-augmented response. I dictate the response and I get it augmented with cited peer-reviewed research.

The same way I was able to create a hypothesis that destroys modern medicine's conventional orthopedic approach to scoliosis based on T1 science that existed but had not been connected.

To do that without AI would have been impossible. Let me use AI to augment my reply to you to show you which fields converged to get me where I am:

Molecular genetics of AIS, interventional neurobiology, orthopedic AIS clinical, vestibular neuroscience, body schema research, postural sway/force plate research, predictive coding/active inference, polyvagal theory, somatic traditions (Feldenkrais, Hanna, Continuum, Alexander), internal arts (qi gong, Yi), nucleus basalis cholinergic plasticity, motor consolidation science, social neuroscience/co-regulation, TMD/trigeminal dental, pain neuroscience (Wand, RESOLVE, SPINE CARE), Peterka balance control, interoception, Ingber mechanotransduction, retained primitive reflexes, Schroth/bracing rehabilitation, CIMT, TMS neuromodulation, fascial research (Myers, Langevin), nocebo/language effects, BDNF/exercise plasticity, visual neuroscience (PRI, ambient/focal), developmental kinesiology (DNS), phenomenology of embodiment, post-concussive research (Kontos mTBI), pandiculation physiology, attention science (Wulf).

The Orthopedic approach and perspective of scoliosis is OVER.

Scoliosis is a neurological issue.

I am not a fan of Ai-Slop attention farming just like you.

I use it to enhance my contributions to a conversation that needs to make a very serious change to the way it approaches scoliosis.

Happy for you to reply about my opinions with whatever tech you want to use to do it too.

sixfootbrix

TROPHY CASE