If you missed out on last week’s post on “The best postural stretch?” you missed a pretty good discussion and exchange of ideas. During the discussion, I had one of those “Ah-ha!” moments that we all have at times! While I was typing the term “reverse posturing” just came out and I have been thinking about it ever since.
I know this itself is no scientific breakthrough and probably not the first you have heard of the term, but I thought to myself, how many repetitive stress injuries can we prevent if we got to the real root of the problem – poor posture during our every day activities. Then I thought – how many times have we as clinicians evaluated someone and just worked on their clinical findings and not the source of their problem? I am willing to bet we all have and will continue to do so at times.
I stated it in the previous post and I will do so again, but I really do not think we can make a significant change in someone’s posture that has been accumulating from years of adaptation to everyday activities. But I bet we can change their postural habits and work with the body to reduce the stress and strain associated with these postural adaptations.
Below is what I would consider key ingredients to my “reverse posturing” theory. Again, I stress that this isn’t completely a unique thought, but rather a combination of several thoughts from people like Janda, Sarhmann, Chaitow, Myers, Travell, Simons, Butler, and many more. I think that you will get better results from combining theories rather than just sticking to one, sort of like taking the key points from each and blending together. Each below is equally important and neglecting any of them will not allow any true progress. This is why we see so many people with recurrent pathologies:
- Positional relief positions – positional release techniques similar to the yoga cobra position we previously discussed. I am starting to think that this is a big issue that we can work on and see some significant results.
- Lengthening of shortened muscles
- Release of postural trigger points
- Inhibition of overactive muscle groups
- Activation of inhibited muscle groups
- Strengthening of synergistic force couples
- Normalization of proper joint biomechanics and arthrokinematics of the joint and other joints within the “chain reaction.”
- Patient education and maintenance strategies
More to come on this as I am brainstorming a bunch about this, but I want to hear your thoughts – what else??? Let’s keep rolling on this thought process!
