March 2007

It’s rare for someone to come and see me because they think they have bad posture.

They come because something hurts, or doesn’t move well, or is limiting their lives in some way. The posture is the second thing they talk about.

“…and I’ve always had bad posture!’ is a very common tag at the end of their first few sentences. Many people seem to believe this is true, but very few can tell me much about their posture.
The other day I was working with another health practitioner who mentioned a headache that was poking her in the left eye as a reason for going home early.

“How long have you had that?” I asked.
“A couple of weeks, it always comes when I sprain my ankle”.
It’s amazing what people say sometimes. I’d noticed the limp but hadn’t asked about it.
“How often do you sprain your ankle”?
“Too often, it’s always been weak”.

This was a colleague talking so I didn’t like to ask the next question, but posture patterning is as much part of me as breathing.

“Have you done anything about it?”

Health professionals are often the worst at getting any help, it’s as if they think they should know everything and be able to do everything for themselves, but they usually don’t.

“No, not this time. I used to do all the rehab. but it doesn’t work with that ankle, usually I wear a brace.”

She’d had her headache all day and it had been around regularly since she’d sprained her ankle a couple of weeks before, and repeatedly for years before that. Her ankle sprain also happened fairly regularly, always the same ankle, and then would come the headaches. Although she had noticed the two things seemed to occur around the same time she’d never investigated the connection.

“Come and look at this,” I said.

When we stood in front of the mirror and looked at how she was standing it was obvious that one shoulder was raised and she was standing with most of her weight on one foot, the foot she hadn’t sprained. The other foot was barely touching the ground.
Getting her to stand on both feet and to support the position of her left shoulder a little differently relieved the pressure on her neck and by the end of our work session the headache had gone and she could stand on both feet. But she hadn’t noticed her shoulder position or made the link to her ankle. Despite working with other people’s bodies everyday she hadn’t connected the way her posture changed when she injured her ankle to the headaches.
Going a step further, she hadn’t wondered why she always sprained the same ankle, couldn’t ever stand well on one foot, and had a permanently tight left shoulder and neck. This is fairly normal, even for health professionals. It’s normal because our posture is just that – normal. We normally stand and move in the same patterns and these become sub – conscious and habitual.
In other words our NORMAL posture becomes so ingrained that we don’t pay any attention to it or notice what’s happening as we go about our lives. When people know what to look for in the mirror their postural pattern becomes very obvious and the way they’re using their body suddenly explains all sorts of things that have been happening, right back to childhood. It’s common sense really. The trick is in knowing what to look for.