Change your posture and live. Are you hurting and don’t know why? There are a lot of people who have seemingly unsolvable chronic pain but there is hope for them.
How to have better posture and less pain.
The basic message of all posture teaching and training should be to get you back to where you originally came from in the first place.
People have forgotten that a two-legged vertical position is their birthright. It seems to me that there are two major camps when it comes to thinking about posture – when people think about posture at all.
One side thinks that posture is hard and affected. Only people trained in dance or soldiering or other equally demanding practices do it. It is difficult to have ‘good’ posture.
The other side thinks that ‘normal’ posture is just how they ‘hang’ in whatever haphazard arrangement of parts that feels ‘comfortable’ that that’s just me chillin’.
Both sides are equally untrue and so far from the actual truth of the subject.
Let’s put away the myth that posture is not important. Let’s start with the basics. We live in a gravitational field. On this scale, there are three dimensions up/down, front/back, side to side. We have to operate within this constraint – until you learn to levitate, then I’ll take your course.
Do you remember X, Y Cartesian planes from school? Two arms (axis) at 90 degrees to each other define space in two planes. Add another arm coming straight out of the page (Z) and you have described three dimensional space. The center where all three lines meet is the point of origin. If we put one of these grids in the middle of your head, another in your chest, one in you pelvis and the last one on the ground between your feet, they all should line up with the points of origin connecting in a vertical column.
Saying the same thing for all you right-brained people; pretend you are a bird or a spy satellite looking downward at the tops of people’s heads. With good posture you would see heads, shoulders and perhaps feet. People would have a very narrow exposure to gravity, what I call a small gravity footprint.
Most posture guides say to stand tall and straight but with little coaching as to how. Most people attempt tallness by overusing the low back muscles. It reminds me of an archer pulling a bowstring taut. It takes work and holding those muscles makes them rigid. It also drops the belly forward and tips the hips downward – poor form. Pilates, yoga and other practices that teach long relaxed low backs with firm but flexible lower abdominal muscles is so much better.
If the spokes of your bicycle are taut on the left side and loose on the right side, the wheel’s axle will not roll in the center and have wobble. Stomach and low back muscles have the same relationship. Actually the muscles of the entire body work in a symphonic arrangement of stretching and tightening, holding and letting go. Just like a symphony orchestra we have to practice to get it right and make it look as effortless as it really is.
