Many people spend hours in the gym trying to achieve a flat belly, toned buttocks and a high, open chest. Yet this result can sometimes be difficult to achieve, and once training stops, everything goes back to square one. In this short article, we will talk about why this happens, what role the spine and jaw play in the structure of the muscles and, above all, how to influence them to achieve a flat belly without any training, simply by understanding the biomechanics of the human body.

The Frame and the Canvas

It would seem simple: train your abdominal muscles and get a wonderful result in the form of a toned, athletic belly. But we forget that these muscles are part of a large and complex system in which the bone structure affects the muscular structure, and vice versa. To make this process easier to understand, imagine the human skeleton as a frame over which a canvas—the muscular system—is stretched. If the frame is bent, as often happens with the spine, the canvas will sag forward. This is exactly what explains a ‘beer belly’ even in thin people. And however hard you try to make the canvas elastic, all these measures will be short-lived and, in the longer term, may even cause the frame to bend further.

As we can see, the structure of the spine is the key to achieving a balanced muscular system that fits around the skeletal framework. But what about what doctors tell us—that to strengthen the spine, we need to train the muscular system? Returning to the comparison of the skeleton with a frame, we can ‘stretch’ and fasten the sagging fabric to it here and there, but in the end we get not a freely hanging canvas on a crooked frame, but a crooked frame rigidly fixed in that position by a skewed canvas. In sports medicine, in the language of body biomechanics, this is called creating muscular compensations.

Source image captions: Daily ab workouts shorten the muscles at the front of the body

Over time, such bands of muscle lead to compression of nerves, arteries and internal organs, which can also affect a person’s psychological state. In professional athletes with distortions of the skeletal structure, such muscular compensations can lead to injuries and even death, as, for example, in the case of swimmer Alexander Dale (a detailed analysis of his muscular compensations is here). But if training the muscular system, and the abdominal muscles in particular, without a straight spine is at best ineffective and at worst unsafe, then what can straighten it?

The Spine, Head Position and the Jaw

Each of us has stood in front of a mirror at least once and, lifting our chest, drawn in our belly. At the same time, we noticed that it would be good to fix this change somewhere around the neck. Many people have also practised holding their head as though it were being pulled upward by the crown. But after making this change through an effort of will, they quickly returned to the original position: the head jutting forward, the chest sunken and the belly protruding. Why does this happen, and what can hold the body in its straightened position?

In recent years, the field of scientific knowledge called gnathology has begun to investigate the effect of the bite and jaw position on the cervical vertebrae and posture as a whole; you can read about this in detail here. Briefly, as the heaviest part of the human body, the skull is supported in an upright position by the first cervical vertebra and a lever system located at the back of the jaw.

It is precisely by influencing this mechanism with a special intraoral device that the head is fixed in an upright position and, as a consequence, the spine straightens. In this position, the muscles at the front of the body, including the chest, are automatically drawn upward, producing the flat-belly effect itself. The man in the cover photo for this article used just such an intraoral appliance to treat his spine, gaining a pleasant additional bonus—an attractive body shape.

Vivid examples of the lucky people who have such a balanced jaw system naturally are the legendary ‘Terminator’ Schwarzenegger and the sexy beauty Salma Hayek. Thanks to their well-developed jaws, both naturally hold their heads upright, and both have an absolutely balanced system of muscles at the front and back of the body. And, without exaggeration, their toned bellies are the perfect standard for the male and female body alike!

Testosterone: how to increase its level biomechanically—here.

Hypochondria: psychosomatics or the result of a biomechanical injury?—here.
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This article uses material from orthotropics.com and starecta.com.