Straighten Before You Strengthen
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I discovered the magic of chiropractic care many decades ago and over the years, as each has retired, I’ve had wonderful experiences finding a new chiropractor, discovering that as similar as each one has been, some have had certain traits that stand them apart from the others. My current chiropractor begins every appointment with an assessment of my posture. This makes sense on many fronts but most especially as I’ve been recovering from a frozen shoulder, which often results in rounded shoulders.
Anyways, recently I visited my chiropractor right after going for a run. I shared with my chiropractor how I was beginning to understand what he was getting at when assessing my posture at the start of every visit. This is because on my early run that morning I had come across an lovely elderly couple out for a morning walk. As they crossed my path, I could see the woman clearly hunched over in the shoulder region. She looked and seemed pretty fit but the hunching was noticeable. I took it as a wake up call that I had better take this posture thing more seriously or that could be me in a few years.
Though, as it turns out, aesthetics should be the least of my worries. Those posture misalignments, the kinds that simply creep in over the years from not paying closer attention, are far more impactful on our capacity to strengthen ourselves than I had ever realized. Misalignments, whether in our ankles, pelvis, hips, shoulders, thoracic spine and or head, throw our joints and the related muscles out of whack. The result is weaknesses in those joints and muscles that we are not often even aware of…until we try to bend and lift something a little heavier, step a little further, pull open a resistant door and or try and push our heavy bag into the overhead bin of an airplane and then it happens. Oow! Something gets strained!
What makes this learning for me worse is that I’ve worked with a couple of personal trainers and taken some group fitness classes over the years and no one has ever mentioned the role of posture when trying to strengthen the body. In other words, if my posture isn’t straight enough then I run the risk of injury if I try to strengthen it. Hence: ‘Straighten the body before Strengthening it’.
And here’s the fun part, if you’re curious about your posture, try the test I did. What you need to do is drop a weighted line from the ceiling near a mirror. I did this by attaching some kitchen twine from a bathroom fixture in front of the mirror, tying some nail clippers to the bottom to hold the twine straight. This line is called a plumb line. Then, with my husband as the observer, he looked at my body position in the frontal view (straight on with the line bisecting my head, through my belly button and between my legs) In this frontal view, he looked at my posture from the anterior (my facing him) and the posterior (my back to him). He noticed no curving action. I seemed pretty evenly balanced from side to side. Yippee!
But here’s where it got really interesting. The next view was the sagittal view. This means I was standing sideways to the plumb line. I was a solid 2” out, with my shoulders and head leaning forward like a rubber necking chicken. The bottom line is that even though I understood what my chiropractor was telling me about posture and how important posture is to being able to safely strengthen the body, until I took a couple of minutes to drop a plumb line and have my husband look for me, I had no clue that I was one of those people with poor posture.
Fortunately, in my case it’s not hard to fix. I make a conscious effort throughout the day to pay attention to my posture. When I’m typing, as I am now, I can feel my shoulders creeping up to my ears and I pull them back down, this is called shoulder stacking. And when I’m out and about or even doing the simplest daily task like brushing my teeth, I pull my shoulders back, making certain my head follows. This is called shoulder retraction. The need to shoulder stack and retract is pretty common in people who spend a lot of time at a computer keyboard. But the trick was the plumbline. I thought I was pretty straight and when I stack and retract, in my brain it feels like I’m exagerating my posture, like I’m forcing my chest out like the character Reese Witherspoon played in the movie ‘Legally Blonde’ while doing the ‘bend and snap’. When the reality is that, for me, stacking and retracting, is putting me in my structurally sound postural position.