Perk Up Your Posture: Look and Feel Great
A Window into Your Nervous System
You may not notice it, but when you’re injured, tired, sick, or experiencing other kinds of physical, chemical, or emotional stress, your body begins to enter a flexed or protected posture. This posture is a little bit like a window into your nervous system.
No matter how it begins, whether from stress, injury, or continued tech use, once you enter what we call that “flexor dominant state,” it means your whole system is not at ease. When we see a patient with poor posture at South Side Chiropractic, we can tell right away their body will be in a predominantly protected state.
Our goal here is to try to keep our Edmonton patients’ nervous systems regulated. This allows our body to remain in more of a state of restoration rather than a chronic state of protection.
The Causes of Poor Posture
Poor posture can begin and progress during our lifetimes. It may be we didn’t want to stand out in elementary or middle school, so we turned inward from that emotional stress. If we weren’t active enough throughout our teens, we might hold this posture through young adulthood as our body continues to flex inward to protect itself.
We can build poor posture due to old injuries as well. If you’ve hurt a shoulder or a hip that wasn’t fully rehabbed correctly, your body will go into that protected posture to compensate.
Many of us don’t realize it, but when you have poor posture, it throws off the mechanics of the joints throughout your body, in addition to wreaking havoc on your nervous system and keeping it in a protective state. This poor posture over time can increase your chances of having headaches, neck pain, shoulder problems, rib pain with breathing, lower back issues, and hip and knee complications.
How Chiropractic Helps
When you develop poor posture, the spine becomes restricted in its extension over time. If our spine has a hard time physically extending, it will be harder for the extensor muscles in our spine to actually fire properly. They become weaker, and you cave forward further, increasing the severity of your poor posture.
Chiropractic works on subluxation in the spine, which is those areas of restricted movement. Our team will work to slowly train your body to improve that extension and range of motion. As it becomes more comfortable for our spine to extend, it becomes more comfortable to sit up straight than it does to slope. When that occurs, we strengthen our muscles and do it more often, creating a positive feedback loop.
It’s also important to have children under chiropractic care for ideal posture because as children grow, their bones are mostly cartilage. As we move from crawling to sitting and then to standing, we develop the three curves in our spine, and chiropractic helps to keep the correct angles in our vertebrae and keep movement fluid throughout our bodies.
By the time they’re about 18, bones start to calcify, and then at that point, we can lose that opportunity.
Keep Active Throughout Care
Musculature around the spine helps support the spine, so we want to encourage and nurture proper movement. We always want to think of posture as exercise. We need to keep focusing on it, or the musculature will regress, just like when you don’t exercise or strengthen the muscles.
Focus on your posture on a regular basis. If you are seated for your job for long periods of time, make sure to take breaks, and when you are seated, ensure that your desk and chair are ergonomically correct and have lumbar support.
You want to ensure your computer screen is straight across from your head so you aren’t looking down. Getting an adjustable workstation, where you can stand and work for certain periods, is also recommended. Changing positions and challenging your body’s muscles to remain flexible is key.
Improve Your Posture—Contact Us Today!
It’s a lifelong commitment to keep your spine strong and in good shape. To do so, we always recommend people keep moving. They should also visit every two to four weeks to get a chiropractic tune-up, depending on how much stress they’re under in their life and what those stressors are.
Contact our office today to get started toward a healthier tomorrow!
