How is your posture today??
Or is this something you’d rather not discuss because you already know the answer isn’t what you’d like it to be?
Whether you’ve been slouching over a computer, a little too focused on your phone or experiencing overall fatigue, your posture tells the story.
Visually our posture relays to others how we are feeling- about our day, about ourselves and even about them.
Your body language is a huge piece of the conversation anytime you are talking with another person.
Kinesthetically our posture is causing our bodies to be on alert- hello headaches, back aches and shoulder tension!
Consider that for every degree forward your head goes over your midline, your brain concludes that you are going to fall over and tightens up your entire upper back. That’s a lot of stress and tension to be carrying around and some of us do it every day!
Internally our poor posture habits can create mental fog, fatigue, lack of focus and more…just from the way you are holding your body up.
Externally our poor posture leads to poor body image and a feeling of down right “frumpiness”. Not exactly what you’ve been spending all of those hours exercising for, huh?
So what does this mean for us really?
It means that we are the cause of our own body aches and some of our own body image distortion.
It means that we are settling for functioning at 50% when we could be functioning at 90-100% every day.
It also means that when others see us we give off the wrong body language signals and instead of appearing confident and professional (or even just happy to see them), we appear exhausted and uninterested.
So how do we fix this?
Well, I’d love to tell you to do 1 exercise 1 time a week and it would all be fixed BUT I can’t.
You see, posture is something that we have to work on day to day.
It needs to be a habit that we build into our daily routine.
If you truly want to get out of pain, while feeling and looking great, try this out:
Take 5 minutes 3 times a day (this week) perhaps at breakfast, lunch and dinner to work on sitting tall and pulling your head back in line with your spine (think about sitting in the car and pressing the back of your head back toward the headrest while still keeping your eyes level so you can see the road).
Then, next week add an extra practice session and the following week add another. Eventually you’ll have more practice sessions than not and will be feeling the effects growing within your subconscious mind so you won’t have to think so hard about it.
Some people find it beneficial to set an alarm or put up a sticky note to remind them to practice. However you choose to do it is fine, just get it done :o)
If you feel like your posture needs some help, join us for our new 30 day Stronger Core and Better Posture program.