Positive Posture Fights Lower Back Pain
August 5, 2010 No Comments
Building a healthy body is like building a house, you must always start with the foundations. In the human body your skeleton acts as the solid ground for everything else to be built upon. Therefore maintaining the strength, stability and alignment of your bones is extremely important in developing a healthy and happy body.
Creating and maintaining a good spinal posture is a great place to start when you are attempting to build a solid footing. It can significantly decrease your risks of developing back problems. Not to mention a comfortable, positive posture will provide a functional range of movement, allowing you to perform simple daily activities with safety.
Much like a hazard warning light in your vehicle, by the time pain presents itself there have been underlying problems for some time. If you were to simply relying on your warning lights to tell you whether there was something going wrong, your car would not be lasting you very long at all. Therefore an absence of symptoms (mostly pain) does not mean that you’re not doing damage to yourself. There are three basic ways you may be causing spinal damage:
- Having poor posture is like having bad wheel alignment, it places undue stress on particular parts of your spine.
- Moving your body incorrectly, whether that be running with an odd gait, or lifting poorly.
- If you are out of shape or overweight. It’s not hard to conclude that excess weight, especially around the belly, will place extra load on your spinal joints and cause increased wear and tear.
All of these strains add up until one day a simple act like bending over can bring on back pain. In that way these stresses and strains are cumulative and will not be obvious until a threshold is reached.
So today let’s just focus on the posture and alignment side of things. When correctly aligned the back has three curves:
- It curves in (forward) at your neck (1)
- Out in the chest region (2)
- In again in the lower back (3).
These curves help distribute pressure evenly throughout the vertebrae and discs. However, a lot of our daily activities and habits are not positively reinforcing these ideal curves. In fact, most of what we do throughout the day worsens our posture. Here are three ways we actually make our posture worse throughout the day:
- At work. Many of us sit at desks, working with computers and reading books. These are very ‘flexor friendly’ activities! In other words we flex our back forward, our neck forward, our shoulders forward, our hips are flexed and even our knees and ankles. We strengthen those muscles responsible to flexing our joints, and these in turn become overly tight. In the same action we work to weaken and lengthen our extensor muscles. When it comes down to it, we are ruining our own postures through poor daily use of our spine!
- At the Gym. Even when we think we’re doing the right thing by getting down to the Gym in order to get fit, we can ruin our posture. Ask any male what muscles they would first want to be bigger and more toned on their body and they will tell you their biceps and pectoral muscles. And what do these muscles do? Flex! So again we are focusing on strengthening muscles that are already strong and are further causing imbalance!
- In Bed. Way too many patients tell me they sleep on their front at night. I have so far refrained from slapping anybody on the back of the head! But it really frustrates me to hear this. Picture the twisting pressure this is placing on the small joints in your neck. And you spend (or at least should spend) 8 hours a night sleeping. That’s a lot of time to be placing your neck in the incorrect position.
So think a little about what your are expecting your spine to put up with day in, day out and how you may be able to address this. And next time I will discuss what we can be doing in order to better preserve our posture, and even strengthen it…. in the right way 
Until next time…
Happing Living
Dr Christopher Hodgetts is a chiropractor at Hillarys Chiropractic, Perth Western Australia. Read more…
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