Poor posture is not only unattractive, it’s bad for your health! That’s right! Not standing up straight is bad health. And bad health leads to pain. Here’s how.
Standing up straight is both a visual clue that your spine is correctly aligned and a method to get and keep your spine in line. So, if you just try to remember to stand up straight, will everything be fine for you, health-wise? The answer is, “Maybe — but probably not. Not without some help.” If you could do it by yourself, without any help, you would have — and you wouldn’t be in pain today. But since you are in pain, you know you can’t do this alone.
If you have poor posture it’s likely the result of one of two things: you were born that way, or something(s) happened to you as you got older. Like you spent too much time with your head drooped forward on the job or at home. You did too much slouching in your chair. You had a car accident, even a minor one. You played sports and got hit, maybe more than once. You fell down chasing your child. You slipped on the ice. You did some bad lifting over the years. You get the idea. Any level of trauma to your body, and specifically to your core and your spine, is a likely cause of your pain today.
And then because you hurt, you automatically did some things in a effort to alleviate the pain, which actually produced the opposite result: You made the pain worse. What does that mean?
Say you hurt your right knee so that when you walked normally it was really painful. Soon, you discovered that if you leaned your body to the left just a little bit, the pain seemed to go away. Or least it wasn’t as bad. So, you started to lean left and put more weight on your left leg. But your body is designed to try and maintain its balance. So, to keep you from falling over to your left, your body automatically bent at the waist slightly to your right, just to keep your balance. Now your right shoulder is tilted up and your left shoulder is tilted down and your whole body is curved to the right. Maybe not much, but it is too much. You didn’t plan it that way, that’s just what your body does to try to keep as close to an upright, balanced position as it can.
Over time, that leaning causes your spine to misalign itself, putting curves where there’s not supposed to be curves and taking out the curves that are supposed to be there.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to get your spine out of whack. And when it is, that’s the origin of pain. Fortunately, you can get your spine back in shape and Structural Therapy is the best, most effective way to do that. And to get rid of your pain without the use of surgery or drugs.
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