Egoscue Practitioner UK

There's a lot of talk about posture nowadays, but what do you know about yours and how do your misalignments affect you on a daily basis?

Watch the video below for a tutorial on your posture and the ways in which it come become compromised.

If you're in pain, it's pretty much certain that your posture has become compromised and your body no longer looks or functions as it was designed to.

Hopefully you will have already read one or more of Pete Egoscue's books, which is why you've ended up here. If you haven't yet read any of Pete's books, you'll find a list of them a bit further down the page; my advice is to start with Pain Free and then, if you want more information, you can read the others too!

I highly recommend Pain Free for Women...if you're a guy and not a gal, you could quite easily think that this book isn't for you. Don't let the title put you off! Pete goes into a lot more depth in this book and talk a great deal about how kids develop from an early age (or not as is ever increasingly the case)...he also talks about adolescence, young adulthood, pregnancy - before, during and after, the menopause, moving into the later years and a whole lot more.

So, if you are in pain, you have almost certainly deviated from how you were designed (I've yet to see anyone whose posture hasn't become compromised to some degree).

This deviation from your blueprint design means that some muscles are working too hard, doing the work that other muscles aren't doing - which is what is called compensation.

Over the weeks, months and years, this compensation eventually leads to wear and tear until finally, your body alerts you to the danger in the only way it knows how: with pain.

The pain that you have is a symptom of the overall problem. Now, rather than treating the symptom, we need to take a step back and assess your whole body.

Knee pain is a common complaint and a lot of money, time and effort is spent on surgery and other invasive procedures. But the question is, "why does your knee hurt?"

If we use your left knee as an example, it's quite possible that the reason it hurts is because your right hip isn't functioning properly.

In an attempt to limit the amount of work it has to do, the right hip then off loads what it should be doing onto the left side. Over time, the left side begins to tire of all the extra work and eventually cries out in pain.

Surgery on the left knee may well silence the knee pain, but it's done nothing to address the reason why the knee was in pain in the first place, which is because of a right hip that simply needs to be reminded of how to function properly.

Pete Egoscue's books explain this concept brilliantly. Rather than being filled with technical jargon, they are written in plain speaking English and he has managed to take a rather complicated topic - the human body - and explain it in such a way that is easily accessible to layman and scholar alike.

You can check out Pete's books below.

When we're in pain, our goal is usually simply to be out of pain...that's natural and it's how I was too.

But what's beyond your pain?

Getting folks pain free is usually the relatively easy part...and we want to get you way beyond that!

The reason that folks experience pain, as explained above, is because their body isn't functioning according to it's design. Put another way, their body has become dysfunctional...they have fallen below the line of function.

So what do I mean by 'the line of function'?

Well, if you were to grab a standard piece of A4 paper and position it in portrait view and then take a pencil and ruler and draw a straight line from one side to the other about a third down from the top...

That line represents the line of functionality - it's where everybody should be.

Anything above that line is super functional...and below that line is, obviously, dysfunctional. That's where those that are in pain (and many that aren't) are.

So the goal of your postural realignment program - in terms of what we want to achieve functionally - isn't and shouldn't be just to get you out of pain. The goal is to get you up to that base line of functionality.

That's where you body moves with ease and grace and all of your joints enjoy a full range of motion. You were like that once, but modern day living kinda got in the way :>)

One of the ways the The Egoscue Method is helping folks to reclaim their body is with The Patch.

What's The Patch?

Great question!

Rather than me explain it, watch the video below of Pete Egoscue, the guy who developed The Egoscue Method, explaining it...

Pretty cool huh?!

The black & white footage that you saw in that video was of an Eastern European (I think Polish) Olympic Weight Lifting Team from around the early 1960's.

Notice how much of their training actually involved lifting weights? Very little.

That's because, like Egoscue, they recognised that the body functions as a unit and it needs to be trained in all areas, in all planes of motion.

What do you mean, planes of motion?

Well, your body is designed to move in all directions: it's designed to twist & turn, roll and tumble, crawl and hop and anything else that your mind can conceive of.

Most of our day to day living involves (at best) linear movement - moving forwards. At worst, it involves no movement at all.

When your body is unable to move in all planes - backward and forward; side to side; twisting and turning - it can function much better as a unit and thus, things like lifting heavy weights becomes easier...

In fact, everything becomes easier, because things are more fluid and your body only has to recruit the correct muscles for the job, instead of recruiting some muscle from far away to do something that it was never designed to do.

You'll find more videos from The Egoscue 'Patch' below...be aware, though, that because The Patch has been around for quite some time, the quality of the next lot of videos kind of reflects that!

One thing I hear quite a lot from folks calling or emailing to find out more about the work I do is something like, "I get the occasional bit of back pain / knee pain / '_____ fill in the blank' pain, but I think I've got pretty good posture".

In my experience, anyone who has pain such as knee pain or back pain also has a compromised posture...a body that no longer looks or functions according to how it was designed to look and function.

In fact, in my experience, pretty much anyone who doesn't have any pain has a compromised posture!

It's a modern day epidemic!

So, would you like to find out for sure? How would you like a complimentary posture assessment to see exactly how yours compares to the 'blueprint design?

On Thursday 27th September, I'm holding a Postural Awareness Open Day at the health club I work at in London.

This is a one day only event and places are already filling fast. To get the full details and to make sure you reserve your spot, click here.

I look forward to seeing you next Thursday!

Matt