Posture

From dictionary.reference.com, posture is:

the position of the limbs or the carriage of the body as a whole

Simple, really, it’s how we sit, it’s how we stand, it’s how we walk.

And, generally speaking how we sit, stand and walk (to put it bluntly) sucks. There, I said it:

Our Posture Sucks

Modern life is a life of great convenience. We have wonderful labour saving tools and machines. We have instantaneous access to a wealth of knowledge and entertainment. All this convenience has made us fat, and it has made us lazy. And through the excess weight and sloth, we are ruining our spines, and our postures.

We hunch over our food, our steering wheels, our desks and our cell phones. We slouch when we walk. We slump down in our easy chairs and on the couch. None of this is healthy.

It looks bad.

Body language experts tell us most communication is non-verbal, it is through body language. Look at the people around you. What is their posture telling you?

It is bad.

But it isn’t mere looks. Poor posture brings with it a host of other issues, some physical, some psychological. Simply put, poor posture is bad for your body, and it’s bad for your brain.

It is fixable.

All this sounds terrible, and in my opinion, it is. But there’s good news; it can be fixed, and the associated health problems can be fixed along with it. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve had poor posture. I slouched through life for 45 years before finally setting out to fix my poor posture, and the changes astonished me. In fact, the improvements to my life that came as a result of posture correction continue to surprise me on a regular basis.

What to do.

Posture correction is both incredibly easy, and incredibly difficult. It is necessary to develop the strength, stability and mobility of muscles and joints through the entire body.

Fortunately, most of the physical problems underlying poor posture can be corrected with a few basic, easily learned exercises. That’s the easy part. The hard part? Half of the hard part is doing the exercises often enough, regularly enough and long enough to make a difference.

Here are three of those basic, simple exercises:

1. Baby Cobra – to strengthen the back line of the spine
2. Bridge  – to strengthen the glutes and the core
3. Down Dog – to stretch the back line of the body, increase mobility of the shoulders, and strengthen the upper body

The rest of the hard part is to break the bad habits of poor posture, while setting up our lives (our homes, our offices, our cars, etc.) so that can maintain healthy posture, and not fall back into poor posture.