How Posture Training Can Directly Improve Your Balance

I meet a lot of people who are concerned about their posture  What's fascinating is "Posture is a primitive reflex"; the primary primitive reflex needed to move through life.  Without a stable posture, we cannot move safely through life and movement suffers.

When it comes to balance, posture is directly involved.  If you're bent over looking at the floor, stooped down closer to the floor, constantly staring at the floor, you're going to end up on the floor.

There's hope!  Postural weakness can be changed, at any age.  Once a qualified trainer addresses visual problems, muscle deficiencies and inner ear dysfunction, posture will change.  Knowing where to look and how to carry yourself is the fist step to better balance.

ALERT**** Neuroscience proves that it's never too late to improve your posture and the way you move through life.  Your brain is hard-wired for survival and once your brain 'feels' safe, your posture, balance and movement will improve****

 Z-Health Practitioners are trained to identify the body systems rendered dysfunctional and activate them to be functional.   Training the vision, vestibular and proprioceptive systems has immediate results but it's up to you to do the drills to make the changes permanent.

If You Stare at the Floor, You'll End Up on the Floor

    Our posture is 90% habitual.  Basically we walk through life on auto-pilot; unaware of our surroundings, not thinking about each carefully planned step or the balance skills and total body integration required to remain upright.

We take our balance for granted.  We take effortless movement for granted.  We take our brain's ability to receive billions of messages each second, understand and analyze that data and send a message to the rest of the body at just the right time, at just the right strength, and with just the right coordination for granted.   In actuality, movement is amazing.

Because most of our movement through life is habitual and because your body gets good at whatever it does, exactly how it does it, our posture is the result of our daily habits.  Vision and vestibular inputs have a tremendous impact on how your carry your head because all the brain wants is a horizontal horizon.

There was a very tall gentleman in my Brains and Balance Training class at Fair Oaks United Methodist Church.  He is a retired pharmacist.  Those two factors have resulted in very poor posture; hunched over shoulders, jutted out chin, head tilt forward, hips tucked forward, inches of his Thoracic spine are bend forward in kyphosis.

This typical forward head carriage is due to muscle imbalances caused by downward vision staring at the floor due to his fear of falling.  After eight sessions, things are looking up!

During the first two weeks of class, he would get very frustrated when I would correct his downward stare with, "Look at your vertical target".  He would shrug his shoulders and begrudgingly look up and correct his posture.  This is going to take some time because we've got 79 years of poor postural habits.

Good postural habits begin in lengthened spine; Spine long, chin slightly down and tucked back.  Every time you even think about your posture, lengthen spine and drop the chin and push back. Find the vertical target.

By the last session, this tall, lanky man was standing on a tightrope, ears in line with shoulders, shoulders in line with hips, hips in line with heels and weight equally distributed between the front and the back foot.  And he wasn't staring at the floor!!!

When asked what the best part of the class was, he said, "the ladies!".   It was amazing what he noticed when he quit looking at the floor.  The lone ranger in a class of ten women including his wife, this guy hung in there and noticed all the pretty face in the room.

Quit letting life pass you by.  Look around, pay attention to your surroundings.  Peripheral vision training can increase your reaction speeds by 25%; start paying attention to what you're not looking at!

Posture is dependent on where you're looking.  If you don't want "old age posture", look forward at vertical targets and stand upright.

The Fall Prevention Lady