Don't Be a Slouch!

Categories: Blog Feb 08, 2015

When I was a kid, my mom would tell me to quit slouching. She'd say, "Stand up, tall." As a child back then, I could not figure out how to do that. I'd try standing on my toes, pulling my shoulder blades together, or even something that probably looked like a walking backbend. It didn't matter what my mom said, I just could not will myself to stand tall.

Flash forward twenty-something years. I found myself in a physical therapist's office due to an injury caused by over-zealous exercise (I had discovered a kettlebell). The therapist told me that i really needed to work on my posture. Apparently twenty years of bench press and watching TV had not done me any favors. She had me practice standing with my shoulders back and my head pointed tall. That was my homework assignment: stand like she showed me and then hold it.

I couldn't hold it. The more I tried to stand with "correct" posture, the more tired my muscles became and the more frustrating trying to have good posture became. I was trying to hold something I did not have.

The posture you have is yours. It is a reflection of your nervous system. In fact, your posture is a picture of the state of your nervous system. Back then, my posture was lazy. I did not have all of my reflexive strength. Trying to fake good posture for me was impossible. I couldn't fake it because I was trying to use a cognitive, muscular effort to hold what is meant to be a subconscious, reflexive reaction to what my body is doing.

Our posture is meant to be developed AND kept by our moving in the ways we were designed to move. In fact, rocking on all fours and crawling around like a baby are what developed our posture as a child. Fortunately, these same movements can redevelop and restore our "correct" posture as an adult; reflexively.

If our posture where a knife, it is designed to be reflexively sharp enough to split a hair in half. That is, having a solid reflexive foundation of strength is synonymous with having a reflexively sharp posture. A dull knife can spread butter, but it is not cutting into a steak very well. We can sharpen our posture by doing a few simple things:

Learn to breathe with our diaphragm.
Spend time rocking and baby crawling - holding the head up; crown of head pointing to the sky.

The best posture to have is the posture that is reflexively "sharp"; the posture that will allow your body to express it's full mobility, strength and grace. This is the posture that keeps you resilient and durable against the forces of gravity, movements, impacts, and life.

You cannot hold something you do not have. Without having your original strength, holding correct posture is like trying to hold air. BUT, you can regain and restore your posture reflexively, the way you did when you were a child. Then you will be able to hold your posture because you own it; it is an expression of what you have. It's all about the foundation and remembering from whence we came.

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