Thursday, November 3, 2016

Your posture says a lot about your personality.

Imagine a strong, powerful, confident person standing in front of you. What kind of posture does that person have? Undoubtedly, the person in front of you is standing tall with an open chest and a head held high. It's a person who looks ready to take on the world.
How you look and feel is directly related to your posture. Despite the importance of having good posture, most of us don't do anything to improve it. We go about our lives with hunched backs and imbalanced hips, and deal with pain because we think it's normal.
Living with bad posture can be a dangerous thing. The muscle and ligament imbalances that result from poor alignment can lead to all sorts of problems:
  • Chronic back, neck, and shoulder pain
  • Foot, knee, hip, and back injuries
  • Headaches
  • Stiffness
  • Fatigue
  • Muscle atrophy and weakness
  • Difficulty breathing
  • Digestion issues
  • Impingement and nerve compression
  • Sciatica
  • Carpal tunnel syndrome
But we're going to fix that right now! By understanding proper posture, you can learn about your own postural deviations and determine which corrective exercises will work best to improve your alignment. With correct alignment and good posture, your lifts will be stronger, your muscles will work more efficiently, you'll help prevent pain and injury, and you'll look and feel a heck of a lot better.1-3

Correcting Your Alignment

To solve a problem, you first need to pinpoint the cause. Most postural deviations occur because the muscles that work to hold a joint in place are imbalanced. Generally speaking, one muscle group will be too tight and the opposing muscle group will be too loose or weak.
For example, those with shoulders that hunch forward too far often have tight pec muscles that pull the shoulders forward and rotate them in toward the midline of the body. Pair tight pecs with weak back muscles and you have an imbalance that pulls the shoulder girdle away from its ideal position. When imbalances like these occur, overactive muscles compensate for underactive muscles, which causes tension, fatigue, and discomfort.
The easiest and most effective way to correct imbalances is to stretch the overactive muscles and to strengthen the underactive muscles.

Standing Assessment

If you haven't been paying attention to your posture, it's probably a given that you have no idea how misaligned your body might be. If you're not sure whether your posture is good or if it needs a little work, do this standing assessment first:
Put on form-fitting clothes so you can see your alignment. Stand barefoot, tall but comfortable, without trying to force yourself into what you think is perfect posture. To get an honest assessment, close your eyes and march slowly in place a few times. This will allow your feet to turn in and out naturally. Bring your body to a stop and stand still. Have a friend take a full body picture of you from the front, the side, and behind.

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