Posture

What is posture?


Posture is the position of your body while sitting or standing. There are good postures and bad postures, and you can’t rely on comfort to tell you the difference. In fact, often the more comfortable you are, the worse your posture is, and you may be creating bad habits that have negative effects on your body. You might have heard the modern mantra, “Sitting is the new smoking.” Obviously, the idea is that most of us are unwittingly harming our bodies through a daily habit. It's true that in our modern world, our occupations and recreations so often involve a lot of sitting for long periods of time, and this has certain repercussions on our health. There is controversy over whether or not sitting increases the risk of diabetes, heart conditions, etc. But I believe there can be no argument that extensive sitting will affect muscles and structural alignment, or posture.

Why is this an issue?



Poor posture can make you weak and stiff. Muscles move your body by contraction of muscle fibres. That means, muscles pull – they do not push. We have agonists and antagonists at work. Where you have one muscle pulling/contracting and causing movement (agonist), you have an opposing muscle extending and supporting that movement (antagonist). Then to reverse the movement, the antagonist muscle becomes the agonist, and contracts, pulling the body back into alignment. When the antagonist muscles are forced to stay extended for prolonged periods, the fibres become stretched and weakened. That negatively affects muscle tone and strength. Meanwhile, the agonist stays contracted for too long, the muscle fibres lack blood flow and become adhesive in nature, resulting in reduced flexibility or range of movement.

How can massage help your posture?


The primary goal of massage is always to achieve homeostasis within the body. That means balance. Whatever is unbalanced, we want to reset it to its proper state. So, where those muscles have been stretched and weakened, massage works to improve muscle tone. Massage cannot strengthen and build up your muscles, you still have to exercise, sorry! But massage can give you the greatest potential for healing and strengthening by clearing the tissues of metabolic wastes, nourishing with blood, and removing any trigger points or adhesions in the fibres. The muscles that have stayed in a contracted state for too long may have a lot of toxin build-up, tightness in the fascia that needs to be stretched out, lack of blood flow, and adhesions in the tissues. Massage can correct all these issues over time.


Now, let’s be sure not to falsely advertise here. Having massage will not give you good posture. Good posture takes conscious effort, core strength, regular exercise, and time. It’s a habit. However, massage will help to treat the effects of bad posture, and enable your body to comfortably practice good posture.