I have lost count of the number of times I have heard this from clients over the years when it comes to moving better and being mor an flexible.
Forget everything you think you know about tight and loose and weak muscles. Posture is mostly a result of neural programming – the relative activation of all muscles in your body determines your posture.
Stretching and strength training have repeatedly shown to have no or weak effects on posture. This makes sense, because stretching doesn’t actually improve muscle length and can thus only affect posture through its neural effects.
Strength training and correction of muscular imbalances can also help, but in reality very little maximal strength is required to maintain optimal posture. Tangentially, there’s also no scientific consensus on what constitutes optimal posture or muscle length.
What determines a person’s posture then? By and large, lifestyle. Sports, strength training, and the status of the autonomic nervous system (fight/flight and rest digest response) affect posture.
But duration is far more important than magnitude regarding posture, and all such activities are thus dwarfed by your lifestyle.
It’s not uncommon to see professional athletes exhibit amazing biomechanics during their performance, yet atrocious posture in daily life. This is because of the body’s amazing ability to adapt in a task-specific manner.
So, if you want to improve your posture, forget about stretching and strength training. You’re already achieving all you can in that respect if you follow a decent exercise program. If you don’t already then start.
The real key is mind over matter.
See the key is that the brain is like Air traffic control at Heathrow airport.
Hundreds of planes (body parts, glands, organs, muscles ) to coordinate, all sending thousands of pieces of information (nerve impulses) to the control Center (brain). Now if that information is blocked by faulty tech or bad weather (physical, chemical and emotional stressors) then the air traffic control is going to be a very stressful place as they are frantically working to prevent a disaster and crisis at the airport.
That is the state of the nervous system when the nerve impulses are interrupted by spinal joints becoming immobile (subluxation in chiropractic speak).
Just as when trying to lose a tic, you must become aware of it and then correct it. Repeatedly. For a long time. Hence the reason we give small exercises repeated lots of times in the initial stages of care.
So don’t waste more than 5 mins a day stretching things, out its wasted time.
Move more , Move often
Get your spine and neural programming checked by a professional.
In time, your posture will improve.
As always take care
Gareth
Dr Gareth Ward DC MChiro
Director Adapt Chiropractic
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