Posture and the Alexander Technique: The truth about Posture
Page 2: The truth about posture
Page 3: Four reasons for NOT sitting up
Page 4: Posture that works
So the truth about posture is:–
A slumped posture is not really a slump at all. It's a pull-down. Your own muscles are literally dragging you down just like a team of men hauling on tight cables fastened to the crown of a tall tree would bend it over.
It's not just your neck. You are also pulling your chest and shoulders forwards and down.
What muscles are pulling? First, your neck, throat and jaw muscles, then your chest, abdominal and even your leg muscles. They are all joining in — like a whole array of cables attached to the tree at different heights.
Of course, you are not prepared to go around bent over like a hunch-back and staring at the floor. Naturally, you do something about it. Automatically, you start to tighten other muscles: down the back of your neck, all down your back and in your buttocks, to haul yourself back up again.
(You may well doubt you do this, just from reading about it, but it is very easy to demonstrate in a first Alexander lesson).
Good old-fashioned posture advice
Seeing your slumped posture, everybody, well-meaning, chips in with the same advice: Sit up! Stand straight!
It soon becomes obvious that this is a struggle. Hence the next juicy bit of advice.
“Do your back and shoulders feel too weak? Then strengthen them! Start a regime of exercises to strengthen your back and shoulder muscles!”
I hope you can now see what bad advice this really is. Your back muscles are already being worked too hard. That's why they don't feel strong enough.
Muscle is fighting muscle in a relentless tug-of-war. When you make the extra effort to be truly straight, the resulting appearance of good posture is a stiff, tiring and unnatural travesty — far less functional, even, than the slump you are trying to correct.
That's why it ends in pain — often extremely severe pain. To get rid of the pain for good you need to sort this mess out.
Just building more muscle (so that it can stand more strain) may relieve the pain short-term, but it will also give you the strength to tighten yourself up even more.
The pain of permanently over-worked muscles is often unbearable. I've seen muscle pain officially labelled as nerve pain simply because the doctor could not believe that such intense pain could possibly be muscular. It can be and often is.
For instance, sorting all this out properly normally gets rid of frequent migraine headaches — for good. Often symptoms begin to respond quite quickly — as muscles are no longer forced to work quite so hard.
Do your shoulders hurt? Then read “Why does not understanding your shoulders cause pain?”.
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