Improve Your Posture, Lessen Your Pain

Poor posture tends to happen naturally. People fall into patterns in the way they stand, how they sit, even how they sleep and all those patterns, how you hold yourself on a regular basis, affects your posture. We want to help you become aware of your patterns and develop postural awareness.

For example, these are the kinds of things you want to look for…

  • How you sit – in the car, or on your couch at night watching TV – How are you sitting? Do you lean to the side?
  • How you stand – Are you standing with most of your weight going through one leg and your hip cocked off to the side?
  • What you carry – Do you carry a pocketbook or bag on only one shoulder?
  • The way you hold your cell phone – that little 3 x 5 thing you carry around with you all the time. Did you know there’s a diagnosis that we have in the musculoskeletal skeletal world called texting neck that occurs from texting?
  • At work on your computer – are you 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.

  • Adjust how you sit so that you are sitting up tall with both feet in front of you.
  • When standing be sure that you have your weight distributed evenly on both feet.
  • Be careful when you’re carrying something on your shoulder, it might be heavy. You need to balance out the weight distribution and maybe carry a backpack instead.
  • If you use your cell phone to text a lot, you must be careful. Don’t hang your head. Instead bring the phone up a little higher.
  • At work, on your computer, you want to be sure you are sitting up straight and taking regular breaks for stretching.

It is also important that you take the time to work on your Core Strength. This isn’t just about having a great set of abdominals. If you’re not working on core strength, we encourage you to go to our YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmxowFFyOGAYoZz4TqgCFzw Once there you will find several videos that talk about the principle and philosophy of what makes core strength. And then a few videos, with exercises.

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