Improve Your Posture
Today is the final post about the physical factors of living and not just being alive, and it’s about your posture, the way you carry yourself. Posture reflects the interplay of your skeletal, muscular, and nervous system: the way you stand, the way you move, and the way you sit. Those all rely on the interaction of the three systems. The key is that we have to train those systems to consciously respond to the way we want to stand or sit until they become automatic.
I was overweight as a kid. One of the things I did was hold my stomach in so I didn’t appear to be so fat. It stuck. I don’t know what it’s like to relax my abs because it seems unnatural to do so. Here’s a secret: you can look five to ten pounds lighter just by holding your abs in and your shoulders back. You also can be taller by training your core to keep your stomach in and training your shoulders to hold your head erect.
There’s a lot going against us. Sofas are soft to sink into, and we do. Even our car seats can make it harder to hold our shoulders back. We are always looking at our cell phones, so we see teens developing the cell-phone hump, which looks a lot like the dowager hump. And even if we stand or sit straight, it may all fall apart when we work or exercise. Do you bend at the waist to pick up a package? Do you run hunched over? Especially when you lift weights, it’s important to get the posture correct so you’re training the correct muscles in the correct movement; that’s why it’s good to have a trainer or physical therapist to help you get started. And by the way, that’s the real reason for the walls of mirrors at the gym.
How do you stand tall? Sit tall? Practice. Once you get the correct posture, you have to keep practicing it until it becomes automatic. We have to fight our nature to slouch standing or sitting. You just have to keep practicing until it becomes automatic. It can impact just about every organ in your body, including your bones. That’s where we’ll pick this up next week.
What are you prepared to do today?
