You can believe it or not, but your posture says a lot about how your body is working. It’s a snapshot of how all the components of your musculoskeletal system work together, and it can shed light on 4 important elements: muscle balance, kinesthetic sense, neuromuscular coordination, and mechanical efficiency. Who knew your posture could say all that?
We’ll start with your muscle balance. Every muscle in your body is there for a reason. They all have a job to do that is very specific. For example, every muscle whose job it is to bend an arm or a leg has an opposing muscle, an “antagonist”, whose job it is to straighten. In a perfectly aligned body, these muscles should all be equal. In many people, however, they’re not equal. One muscle will be dominant, or “stronger”, than the other, which means they demand more from the nervous system. What happens to the weaker muscle? Well, it just keeps getting weaker as it gets less attention.
Now, kinesthetic sense is technical term for how we move without the use of visual aids. If you close your eyes and bend over, and raise your arm and bend it 90 degrees, you still know where your hand is, right? That’s kinesthetic sense. If you have good kinesthetic sense then you know when your posture is out of alignment. Someone with poor kinesthetic sense, however, doesn’t know they have bad posture. If they could see themselves as others see them, they’d probably be shocked at how they’re standing and walking!
Neuromuscular coordination is, in a nutshell, how your eyes, your ears, your muscles, and many other things work to gather information about your environment and then use that information so you can move accordingly. If you’ve ever been on a rocking boat then you’ll get the picture. It’s how your body stabilizes itself based on the outside environment. Someone with poor neuromuscular coordination stumbles often, and is more prone to injury than someone with good coordination.
Mechanical efficiency is how your body moves as a whole. If your alignment is off, your body, or your “machine”, if you will, won’t function correctly.
When one of these key elements isn’t working properly, your posture will show it. Every time you walk it will show, since the way you walk is really just your posture in motion. If left untreated, whatever element is throwing off your posture or gait will cause long-term, negative effects to your body, along with chronic pain such as back pain or joint pain. Take a good look in the mirror, and see what your posture is trying to tell you! And then take steps to get yourself back on track and pain-free.
Anthony Carey is the author of “The Pain-Free Program” and the founder and CEO of Function First. Function First helps those with back and joint pain eliminate it using a method called corrective exercise. To learn more about this simple, effective, non-invasive approach to pain relief and receive a free chapter from Carey’s book, “The Pain-Free Program” visit http://www.AnthonyCareyInc.com
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