22
Jun

All About Posture

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Let’s talk about posture.
When you read that, did you automatically sit up straighter? When posture is on your mind, you naturally take steps to correct it. That’s great! It’s the exact thing we want, constant postural awareness. When we are standing or sitting, even sleeping. We want to have that postural awareness all the time.

Do A Self-Assessment

First, stand in front of a mirror and in a neutral, normal posture for yourself, straight on and look for:
  • Head tilts (If your head is tilting to the left or right)
  • Head rotation (if it’s not facing exactly forward)
  • High shoulders (one shoulder higher than the other)
  • High hip (put your hands on your hip to see if one hand is higher than the other)
Next, look at yourself from the side and look for:
  • Is your ear over your shoulder?
  • Is your shoulder over your hip?
  • Is your hip over your ankles?
If you see any of the items described in the front view or anything than what is described in the side view, you’ve got a distorted posture.
The first thing you need to know is that posture distortions tend to happen naturally.
The thing that affects your posture is your posture.
Meaning, how you hold yourself on a regular basis affects your posture. Such as:
How you sit – in the car, on your couch at night watching TV, or whatever you’re doing. How are you sitting? Up tall or are you leaning to the side. That is the kind of thing you want to look for – that is having postural awareness.
How you stand – when you stand, do you stand on both feet with equal weight distribution? Or are you standing with most of your weight going through one leg and your hip cocked off to the side?
  • Carrying a pocketbook or book bag on only one shoulder. Be careful when you’re wearing something on your shoulder, and it might be heavy. You need to balance out the weight distribution – maybe carry a backpack.
  • Your cell phone – that little 3 x 5 thing you carry around with you all the time and looking down at! Texting. Did you know there’s a diagnosis that we have in the musculoskeletal skeletal world called texting neck and it occurs from…you guessed it all the texting! So, if you’re texting a lot, you have to be careful about that. Don’t hang your head, bring the phone up a little taller, a little higher.
  • Computers are another thing – sitting hunched over, head forward, shoulders down. If your head is forward, we call that anterior head posture. Where your head is in front of your shoulder. That’s primarily from that texting and working on a computer.

How Do You Fix It

It’s all about posture awareness, being aware of your position space and making adjustments to correct poor posture.

Think about a mirror image.

If you’re finding yourself with your head forward, you want to stretch backwards.

If you find yourself with arms that turn in because you have more developed chest muscles and upper back muscles, you want to stretch those chest muscles and strengthen the back muscles.

At MHWC, we are a huge proponent of core strength. Core strength is not just abdominals, we’ve seen men and women come into my office with six packs, and not know how to use them. If you’re not working on core strength, you don’t have it. We encourage you to go to our YouTube page.

Where you will find several videos that talk about the principle and philosophy of what makes core strength. And then a few videos, for exercises, specifically three exercises that you want to think about doing to look at this more closely.

As always, if you have any questions about, please give us a call. We are always ready to help you achieve better health, naturally!