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Science Put Into Practice

The Pettibon Weighting System TM

How does The Pettibon System re-align your spine so that it can function optimally in its upright position relative to gravity? With the patented Pettibon Weighting System.

The Pettibon Weighting System consists of specially designed head, shoulder, and hip weights that you wear daily for up to 20 minutes. The amount of weights and their placement depend upon the spinal misalignment that needs to be corrected.

The nervous system always wants us to hold our heads upright and it has five righting reflexes that continually send it skull and spine positional information. Wearing the weights alter the body's centers of mass, causing the righting reflexes to send this new sensory information to the nervous system. To balance the body relative to the weights, the nervous system causes some involved spinal muscles to relax and others to contract, thereby correcting the spine and posture relative to gravity. Additionally, the weights force the involved muscles to do isometric exercises. This is needed to restore their strength, endurance, and balance so that the spine is held in alignment after optimum strength has been gained.

Why Isometric Exercises?

Two kinds of muscle fibers make up the musculoskeletal system. One is fast-twitch muscle fiber. The other is slow-twitch muscle fiber. Muscles have both types of fibers but usually one fiber type dominates a muscle group. Our postural muscles have mostly slow-twitch fiber.

In the gym, when we're 'pumping iron' and doing aerobic exercises, we're affecting fast-twitch muscle fiber or phasic muscles. What's happening to our postural muscles? Not much. So exercises to strengthen phasic muscles don't improve posture.

When phasic muscles fatigue and/or when they're injured they go flaccid and collapse. Postural muscles react very differently from phasic muscles when they're injured or fatigued: they spasm. And the way postural muscles spasm is rarely even, either side-to-side or front-to-back. That's why poor posture distorts our appearance because our spine is no longer aligned.

Isometric exercises, which involve pushing against a force that moves very slowly or doesn't move at all, help eliminate postural muscle spasms as well as rehabilitate their balance, strength, and endurance.

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