Poor Posture?

Stressing The Body

As the summer has progressed, we have found that our patients continue to find new, exciting, and unfortunate ways to stress their bodies. Changes in life, schedule, school, work, activities, etc. keep us on our toes and have everyone working to combat different types of stress every day. Handling stress is really the most important thing you can do for your overall health and well-being. Reducing the negative impact on your body, and continually adding in new positive ways to influence our health to combat stressful issues as they arise are key pieces in determining how well you feel. We are constantly talking about stress management with our patients, as stress is often the root of all our issues. Our bodies are always tackling physical, mental, and chemical stressors and these things are all present every day and can be overwhelming at times, causing conditions to get worse. Mental stress is typically the hardest to manage. Everyone deals with things in different ways, and some things affect you more than others. Chemical stress is always around us, and the main culprit is the food/drink that we put into our bodies. The negative effect of these stressors is combated by the “more good, less bad” mentality. Adapting a positive mindset, eating healthy, sleeping more, and taking supplements goes a long way to bettering your health. Physical stress is what we deal with the most in our office. Most of our patients are dealing with some type of physical pain because of stressing the body poorly. This can be a result of a one-time occurrence like a new injury, but often it is the result of perpetual bad habits that we have formed. The worst of these bad habits we all have is poor posture. In a world with cars, computers, phones, books, etc. it is difficult to avoid sitting and slouching. Over time, we develop postural issues called upper and lower crossed syndromes. Upper crossed syndrome occurs when our upper back rounds forward, and it is caused by tight muscles in the chest and weak muscles in the back- this also crosses into the neck, causing tight muscles in the back of the neck and weak muscles in the front. The same is true in the lower back- sitting too much tightens the hip flexors and weakens the glutes, and crosses with tightening the lower back and weakening the core/abs. To combat upper and lower crossed syndromes and improve our posture/spinal health, we need to stretch and strengthen specific things. Stretching the neck muscles and pecs, while strengthening the back/shoulders reduces the slouching; and stretching the hip flexors and lower back while strengthening the core and glutes reduces the negative effects of sitting. Ask at your next appointment how to help yourself limit the physical stress of poor posture.

-Dr. J.