Correcting Posture

Rather than dive into how to start correcting posture, the first thing is to actually understand what the question means.

Ask most people what 'posture' means and they will more than likely use the word 'position' in their explanation. Referring to the Oxford English dictionary, it seems to be correct, because it too uses the word 'position' in one of its definitions.

However, teachers of the Alexander technique are less inclined to describe posture as a position because there is so much more to it. Perfect posture is often misunderstood as a certain position that one must hold.

My first golden tip to you is that good posture is not a position but a continually moving relationship of parts of the body. The quality of the relationship is the thing that determines the quality of the posture. That freely moving relationship is what we all strive for, except most of the time we can't quite put our finger on it.

Another common misunderstanding is that good posture is something that you have to remind yourself continually to achieve. Like playing the piano we think that if we practice often enough we can achieve a perfect posture.

This way of thinking seals our fate, because no matter how hard we consciously try to remember to have a good posture it will by it's nature elude us.

The reason for this is pretty simple actually. The parts of the brain that is responsible for controlling posture is very primitive. Obtaining conscious control over postural reflexes is not only impossible, it is actually completely unnecessary.

Let me put this in more simple terms. When you see a young child that is perhaps only four or five years old, it is very clear that there is no need for them to improve posture. They may not be able to spell or even pronounce 'great posture', but they sure have it.

A very young child has this amazing posture because it has not yet learnt the bad habits that we pick up later in life, not because they are good at remembering to sit up straight.

Therefore I want to make it absolutely crystal clear that posture correction does not involve consciously remembering to sit up straight. In my experience that just does more harm than good because it introduces more tension into your muscles.

I have tried to point out previously that everybody has good posture naturally. As far as I'm concerned, if we can understand how we lost our naturally good posture we will be headed in the right direction.

At this point, I could try and write a lot of words to try and explain exactly how we lose our natural poise. I could write about the way that a child is made to sit in a school chair for thousands of hours, thus causing their posture to deteriorate. However it is far more effective just to show you the following video.

The video has some great visual aids because it uses a model skeleton to show exactly how the backward sloping seat of a school chair causes the pelvis to roll backwards. It goes on to explain that the child then must lean forward to their school desk - hunching their backs. Once the child has learned this habit, it is necessary for them to repeat it for thousands upon thousands of hours over a period of 12 years or more.

This is the primary cause for loss of good posture, and in order to achieve successful posture correction it is necessary to remove all backward sloping seats in our office.

In the video there is some advice on how to do this, ranging from wedge shaped posture corrector cushions to more expensive tilting seats.