| Good posture is your best investment. It does not matter what I am treating a patient for, but something I will always leave them with is advice on how to get a better posture. Consistently working on your best version of “good posture” is what we call a low hanging fruit. Because it applies to everyone. Roughly a third of our adult lives we spend at work. And most of that time, for office workers, is traditionally spent sitting. To make it worse, our recreational time has also adopted sitting – dinner tables, couches, restaurants, coffee shops, movie theatres, and most forms of transportation. One way to view good posture is to view it as a type of sport. When you start practicing for it, you will be unfit, it will feel unnatural and you will certainly feel it the next day. Of course, I also slouch. You will have the privilege of catching out the teacher occasionally. But when I do slouch, my body immediately reminds me to sit up straight. It becomes instinctive. You too can develop that good reflexive instinct or habit, that’s called Neural Re-education. There is a mechanical reason why good posture is important: Instead of having the normal 3 curves to our spine, when we sit or slouch (bad posture), we create one big forward bending curve. And that’s a problem, because certain parts of our spine will begin to wear and tear quicker. “Sitting is the new smoking”. I wish I made up that saying but I’ll admit that I read it somewhere. But it is true. We can almost predict the risk for back pain based on the number of years spent in an office or working behind a screen. Remember that our brains are plastic and they will change and adapt to the environment they are given (Neural Re-education). If you practice a good posture long enough, or continue doing any of your therapist’s recommendations long enough, you will eventually learn the new movement pattern. The bottom line is this : moving in a way that creates a healing environment for our spine will add functional years to our lives, and that’s something worth investing in. Cheers to 2023. Keep moving, Cuan |
‘Good posture is your best investment’
