author: Michaeleen Doucleff
...After returning home, I started seeing this "table" bending in photos all around the world — an older woman planting rice in Madagascar, a Mayan woman bending over at a market in Guatemala and women farming grass in northern India. This bending seemed to be common in many places, except in Western societies.
"The anthropologists have noted exactly what you're saying for years," says Stuart McGill, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who has been studying the biomechanics of the spine for more than three decades.
"It's called hip hinging," McGill says. "And I've spent my career trying to prove it's a better way of bending than what we do."...