A lot of my patients come to the clinic wondering exactly how Pilates will benefit them and I get asked this question all the time:
But I exercise regularly, shouldn’t that be enough to improve my posture?
And it is a good question. Logically, you would think that if you exercise and get strong, your posture will be sorted. However, unless you are conscious of what your good and bad habits are, you could potentially be over training different areas of your body and failing to execute movements with the precise control to change your posture and overall alignment. In order for you to maximise the benefits of your exercise on your posture, it is critical that you maintain optimal positions whilst you’re performing the particular activity.
To give you a great example, a few months ago I had a client come into the practice for treatment of his lower back pain. This man was an elite football player and he had read into the benefits of Pilates to improve his core stability and his football performance.
As we moved through the comprehensive initial assessment, I handed him a 1.5 kg weight and asked him to perform an exercise for his lower back (I had identified a weakness in this area during the assessment) Funnily enough (for me, not him) he was not even able to perform more than 3 repetitions with this light weight. He stood in front of me, shaking his head in total disbelief that he was unable to lift such a light weight. After all, he had spent many hours in the weight room strength training for football practice and could bench press his body weight.
My point – some of the muscle groups that he needed to work on to improve his posture, and muscle balance, were not being addressed in his current weight room program.
Generally, when we have to undertake a task, we revert to what is ‘natural’. Unfortunately, this only solidifies these bad habits and reinforces our bad posture by strengthening muscles that are already overactive and failing to activate our ‘underperforming’ muscles.
However, I have some positive news for you.
Regardless of how old you are and what condition your body may be in, it’s never too late to improve your flexibility, strength and resultant posture.
Listed below are the three keys to improving your posture:
- Having an intimate knowledge of your body and what it is you are working on.
- Awareness of your body to allow the process to begin.
- The correct exercise, built into a daily routine, followed up with regular check-ins throughout the day.
If we avoid strengthening muscles we know are weak, they will only get weaker. If we are unaware of the problem, sooner or later we’ll figure it out when the body starts hurting or gets injured. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to use back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, hip pain, knee pain, or foot pain as the red flag that we need to pay better attention to our body and could become pro-active to maintaining good strength, flexibility, and posture?
In part 3 of this blog post, I will get you to test your own posture, so stay tuned!
