You might question why posture is crucial to athletic performance, better workouts, and overall health. After all, you’re goal is to build muscle, run faster, go longer, not focus on posture, right? But proper posture is essential, even during exercise. It can prevent injuries and enhance your overall workout.
Why Is Improving Posture Important?
Gravity impacts our bodies whether we’re standing or sitting. Our joints, ligaments, and muscles rely on our brain center called PMRF (pontomedullary reticular formation) to maintain an upright position. However, lifestyle habits or past injuries can disrupt this connection. Proper posture is crucial for balance, movement, and breathing, both at rest and during exercise. Here’s how improving posture can benefit you:
- Self-Confidence: Good posture boosts confidence. Slouched posture often signals a lack of confidence.
- Hormone Function: Better posture improves breathing, which impacts brain function and hormonal balance.
- Digestion: Proper posture reduces compression on digestive organs. This is why activity and deep breathing are recommended for issues like constipation.
- Spine Health: Good posture minimizes compression on vertebrae and maintains proper spinal alignment, enhancing communication between the brain and body.
- Decreased Joint Pain: Poor posture with the weight of gravity put extra stress on your joints contributing to tension and pain.
- Injury Prevention: When posture is compromised the joints are in an uncentered position increasing the risk of injury in exercise and athletic movements.
What is the Proper Posture?
When trying to have good posture the chest up and out position is often the go-to, but that’s far from what it needs to be. Proper posture must follow the principles of movement below:
- Neutral spine – avoiding excessive curvature or lack of
- Neck over crotch – think of your neck always being lined up over your crotch area
- Biological breathing – engaging the barrel, expand your sides out
- Shoulder blades in the back pocket – if your shoulders move back and chest goes out then you’re doing it incorrectly
- Ball over bump – the ball of your hip joint should always line up over the bump of your ankle
- Tongue to the roof of your mouth
- Swallow the rod – if you were to swallow a rod you could hunch over or be over-extended
What Are The Three Top Postural Deficiency Presentations?
The most common postural deficiencies can be classified into 3 categories:
- Upper Cross Syndrome: Characterized by forward-slouched shoulders and head due to weak back muscles and tight pec muscles.
- Lower Cross Syndrome: Weak abdominal muscles and tight lower back muscles cause excessive lower back curvature and pain.
- Layered Syndrome: A combination of upper and lower cross syndromes.
Posture dysfunctions are prevalent among people who sit or stand for extended periods. This includes students, receptionists, truck drivers, dentists, and more. Even children are affected due to frequent phone use. We’re seeing more issues as our lifestyle becomes increasingly sedentary
Exercises to Improve Your Posture?
I am a HUGE proponent of DNS or Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization and utilize the principles of Developmental Kinesiology on a daily basis with my patients and in practice. Here is a sneak peek of what that is about but you should check out my YouTube channel for more videos related to DNS.
Now, if you can hold these poses and maintain stability through these functional movements, you are going to have the best posture without having gone to the gym once!!! Health is in movement and nature is the perfect designer of our body (to say the least). If we follow the basics of nature and creation and keep working on that, it is absolutely reasonable to think that the end result is going to be the one we are after. Your health is your biggest investment and it is not an event that happens over night.
Don’t hesitate to contact the office if you still have questions.
Dr. Shakib