What is good posture? Many people confuse it with position.
Posture is not a position but a way of responding to the challenges of everyday life.
All movement grows out of your posture and what lends meaning to your movement and posture is your orientation.
You have a posture as you orient yourself to move toward or away from something.
You might put on a posture hoping people will see you in a certain way, and might wear your more comfortable posture only when alone or with friends.
Good posture while you are standing and talking to a good friend is quite different from the posture you have when talking to a stranger or someone you feel threatened by.
There is a standard way of thinking about posture as the bones of your body and how they are stacked up like bricks or building blocks. Maybe your head has to be in a precise position above your chest, which is a precise position above your pelvis and so on, down to your feet on the floor.
You can try standing in this kind of alignment like the Queen’s guards or a teacher of ‘deportment’ with a book balanced on your head. The difficulty with this concept of posture is that it does not allow you to move easily and your breathing becomes held and strained.
Your body can’t be compared to a stack of blocks or a building because you have a brain – and your brain determines your posture.
No-one comes to standing for no reason – we all stand up for something.
As infants we learned to stand to do something, and we continued to learn to do things for a reason. So our personality and self image, our egos and intentions to perform actions determine our posture and not some artificial ideas based on mechanical alignment.
Most of us form habits at an early age and then become unaware of them. We might not notice our posture unless someone points out that we are slumped or until we feel a painful tightness in the back.
It is an ongoing dynamic process that expresses itself in the way we stand, sit or lie on the floor.
The physical benefits of good posture also impact our quality of life. The unique design of the human skeleton to stand and bear weight enables us to turn quickly, run long distances, and reach and manipulate objects (like ski poles, paint brushes, and tennis racquets).
Habitual poor posture, however, creates the necessity for our muscles to hold up mass that should be supported by our bones.
We deprive ourselves of the power we’re designed for and lose energy more quickly.
We can also end up with chronic pain or repetitive stress injuries caused by under-utilizing our core strength to support the movement of our limbs.
We begin to move like an aging person (and feel like one), instead of enjoying our true capacity to run, dance, jump, and climb, or to sit without backaches and support.
Our posture however, is so much more than a physical event.
Our posture contains our entire emotional history. It is our own personal signature.
In our posture, we express our attitudes, our most basic emotions, the influences of our culture, and often our intention. It contains a story, the story of our life.
So why should we care about posture?
Because it can liberate our thought patterns and free our muscles and joints for fuller breathing, better balance, coordination and flexibility.
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