Passion for posture

April 6, 2020 by Vicki Aldridge, GOsC Registered Osteopath

After over twenty years of practising osteopathy I have become very passionate about POSTURE. So what is posture? It is much more than just standing upright and putting your shoulders back.  Posture is everything! It’s about the balance of your mind, body and spirit.  If your physical posture improves not only does your digestion, breathing and circulation improve but YOU ‘feel’ better and it improves your mood, and vice versa. 

 
“A strong body makes the mind strong.” – Thomas Jefferson

So how can we make our bodies and minds strong. Well we have to nurture them. A little effort goes a long way and something is better than nothing. The more we look after ourselves, the better our lives will be. It’s as simple as that!

 
Posture relates to Balance. To get a good balanced structure you need a good foundation and some good building blocks. Your foundations for standing are your feet, supported by your pelvis, and for sitting it’s the other way around, its your sitting bones, supported by your feet (more about this in another blog).
 
These are my five building blocks to build good posture;

• Breathing: deep steady regular breathing stimulates the whole body and relaxes the mind. It has also been proven to reduce adrenaline/ stress and engage your core/ deep stabilising muscles. Just remember there are about 30-40 trillion cells in your body, and they all need time and space to breath.
• Good hydration and a high quality balanced nutritious diet with as little processed food as possible should give you the best chance of getting most of the nutrition your body needs to perform and react positively to your daily demands. Supplements can help but they should only be added and shouldn’t substitute the real thing unless really necessary! Supplements are usually just a chemical interpretation of the ‘nutrient value’.  Generally, the more processed foods and supplements the less nutritional value it has. Primarily we should eat to feed our bodies not our minds!
• Physical fitness and movement; if you don’t use it you will lose it. The question I like to ask is ‘how fit do you need to be to do what you want to do comfortably?’. We know we need to eat and drink every day but we also need to move! Find something you like doing, start small and stay comfortable/ don't try too hard. Hopefully physical fitness is a state of being not a race to get there!
• Mindfulness: ‘being present in the moment’ gives you time to listen to your body and try and work out what is needed and what your body is trying to tell you. It also gives us an opportunity to work with ourselves.  It helps us work out what our body does and doesn’t like, especially when trying something new. Just remember life is about learning but we need to be open to it, and positive playfulness is the best way to learn! Give it a go and you might be surprised what you  do learn!
• Proprioception; you need feedback from your body to know where you are now, where you are going and how best to get there! This ties in with mindfulness. If you don’t know something is wrong how can you can change it. The best way to improved proprioception is to start with simple balance exercises to give you time to listen to your bodies feedback, yes simple really is best.  Once these basic exercises get easy, and you can do them without thinking, you can then add another layer of complexity. By getting this layer of exercise good everything else becomes much easier.

Once again, it’s about balancing all these parts. Not too much not too little, just enough of all.  The difficulty is that balance is different for everybody on every day, so there is no set formula but just a state of mind and body.  This also varies at different times of your life, even day to day, hour to hour! You just need to find the best posture and balance for that moment on that day. This should make tomorrows search easier.  There is no right or wrong just a comfy fluid place in the middle (hopefully).
 
The best advice is just be sensible and give it a go - or ask us for more help and advice, but if you don’t try you will never know! We are than happy to help!
 
I propose to do a series of blogs relating to this and I hope you will find them useful. It is a massive subject so if you have any questions please just ask!
 

 
A few words to think about Posture = Poise = Presence =  Attitude= Positivity = Passion = Playful=  Upright = Inflated = Active neutral = Martial arts = Energetic = Honest = Genuine = Content = Happy!