Good posture can help prevent (and relieve) aches and pains, improve your outlook, and positively affect your brain (CSF flow).
Even if you don’t think you’re guilty of the most common postural mistakes (hunching your shoulders or rounding your back), you might be missing one key part: proper balance.
To stand upright, you balance your body over your feet – front to back, and left to right.
Your spine etc should be aligned over your pelvis, with your weight evenly distributed between and across your feet.
When standing, many people tend to favour more weight over one foot or with their weight over say, the inside or outside of their feet.
Give it a go now. Stand up, close your eyes and march on the spot for a few paces. Open your eyes and stand there for a while. How do your feet look? How do they feel? Is it comfortable standing there? Are you trying to shift your weight?
(The marching with your eyes closed is to put you into a natural position for you feet and hips)
Ideally, you should feel even pressure on the balls of your big and little toes as well as your heels. These three points create a ‘tripod’ – three points of contact on each foot. If you feel more pressure on one or more of these points, you are not in alignment and may need some assistance in correcting these postural habits, a quick assessment in clinic and we’ll know how best to tackle this 👍🏻
If you stand for prolonged periods, or work out a lot – squats, deadlifts, KB work etc, arguably this becomes even more important.
A neutral foot position (not push through your heels, or other cues you may have heard thrown around the gym) is so important to make sure you’re safe and minimise the risk of injury.
If you don’t have the three (6!?) points of your tripods engaged you’re likely compensating with your knees / hips / pelvis / back or neck muscles, which whilst not impeding your performance, may well be affecting more than you think.
Obviously (🤷🏻♂️) when using a quadruped position for anything, the points of contact / engagement change – I’ll cover this soon too 😊👍🏻
By the way, the image is not the best example of feet, but useful for demonstrating the positions you should be focused on.
I’ll post about feet and shoes soon! #SoManyPostsToDo 🤣
Image credit unknown
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