How important is good posture to your body, really?  Some people believe that if you don’t have great postural habits, then you’re always going to hurt. Yet there are some people who slouch through life with little to no pain.

What healthy or good posture does is help in our fight against gravity. Here’s how.

The head is heavy. If it’s lined up correctly, your neck and shoulder muscles can work as they should; if not, you get a tight neck, tight shoulders, and eventual pain.

What’s the proper position for healthy posture? Your ears should line up with your mid-shoulder, as viewed from the side. That places your head and torso in proper position to support your head’s weight. Then your neck muscles can perform as designed, stabilizing and mobilizing to let you easily turn your head, nod, etc. That’s “good posture.”

Posture vs Gravity

What happens when your head is out of position, or “turtled” forward?  Tight neck and shoulders, leading to pain.  Those back-of-neck and shoulder muscles weren’t designed for that kind of counterbalance.  When your positioning is off kilter, the muscles are literally fighting gravity all day long.  They over-contract, can’t work as designed, meaning you can’t rotate and extend your head without pain or limited range-of-motion like you should. That’s not “good posture.”

Your posture can tell me a lot about how your body is doing.

I look to see if your posture is “correct” and if not, why?  Postural imbalance and resulting pain could come from a usage imbalance, genetics, a muscle misfire due to an entrapped nerve, or an irritated organ. From a Rolfing Structural Integration (Rolfing SI) standpoint, I know that the most common reason for your bearing to be off is that your body’s compensating for the pain or discomfort these can cause.

Correcting these internal misalignments are what Rolfing is all about. If postural imbalance is causing you discomfort or pain, my focus will be to restore your body’s balance. I’ll review your posture and take you through a diagnostic process to find the true source of the issue, and improve your posture, too!

Christopher Horan’s Rolfing therapies help to restore your body’s ease, balance and strength. You can schedule a Rolfing appointment with him in Horan Rolfing’s Tacoma or Bellevue office. Good posture is only a call away.

Nerves can be tricky little suckers.  They’re really good when telling you that something is wrong, but very frequently can be a bit misleading as to the where something is wrong.  Often the symptoms will show up further down the line of the nerve.  And to make things even more confusing, nerves communicate with one another, so if one nerve is compressed and irritated often one or multiple nerves around it will try to communicate to the brain that something is wrong.  The brain then interprets the info and tells you that those nerves should “hurt” as well and bingo you have multiple areas that seem inflamed.  For a really good explanation on how pain works, you should check this This Blog out.

Compression points (spinal, organ, muscular).  There are a few areas that are common compression points for the sciatic nerve.  One is right at the spine; if you have damage to one of the intervertebral discs, it can protrude into the nerve area and irritate it.  You can have a narrowing of the opening at the vertebra.  The nerve can be completely healthy coming out of the spine and then get compressed by one of the organs that is sitting in front of it (ie. the Sigmoid colon, Rectum, etc).   One other common compression point is when your piriformis (a deep lateral rotator of the femur) is too tight and compresses in on the space where your sciatic nerve comes out of the pelvic bowl and heads down into the back of your leg.

At My Rolfing Practice in Bellevue, WA I see clients quite often with sciatica type symptoms.  Using a few diagnostic tests, I discern which nerves are involved and if the visceral system is involved or not.  I then free up the affected structures.  We might then need to balance some of the other surrounding structures.  We might also need to take a look at your movement patterns to see if we need to retrain how you are moving.  I also often have to talk to people about how they are using their body that might have gotten them here in the 1^st place and see how we might be able to alter some of the habits and/or patterns.

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During pregnancy, your body produces a hormone known as Relaxin, which is believed to help prepare the pubic area and the cervix for the birth. The Relaxin loosens the ligaments in your body, making you less stable and more prone to injury. It’s easy to overstretch or strain yourself, especially the joints in your pelvis, lower back, and knees.  A lot of different pains can show up in your body that weren’t there before the pregnancy. That’s why its even more important to have proper balance throughout your structure.

Rolfing sessions in My Office in Bellevue, WA will help ensure that you’ve got proper balance throughout your body.  This will help decrease pain and mitigate any pain you might have developed with a less balanced body.

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Clients receive Rolfing from me for while Pregnant from all over the Puget Sound, including: Bellevue, Seattle, Renton, Redmond, Mercer Island, Kirkland, Lynnwood, Issaquah, Tacoma, Puyallup, Newcastle, Gig Harbor, Fircrest, & University Place.

One of the ways that a healthy posture can be a good thing is that it means you’re fighting less against gravity. For example, if your head is properly positioned over your torso (your ears should line up with your mid shoulder as viewed from the side) then you entire structure gets to support the weight of your head. This allows the muscles in your neck to perform their designed tasks of stabilizing and mobilizing (i.e. turning, nodding, etc.). However, if your head is shifted out in front of your body it puts a lot of stress on the muscles in the back of your neck and shoulders to hold the weight of your head up while gravity pulls down on your head. This fatigues these neck and shoulder muscles as they weren’t designed to counterbalance the pull of gravity all day long. So they get tight from over-contracting all day long and they’re not freed up to help rotate and extend your neck and head as they were designed to do.

Posture, from a structural integration standpoint, can be an indicator that something is not right in the body. The postural imbalance might be coming from a usage imbalance, or an entrapped nerve that is not allowing a muscle to fire as it is supposed to, could be a genetic variable, etcetera. There are many ways that posture can be affected.

More important question to ask your self when looking at posture is why is the posture not “correct”? As well as, asking whether the poor posture has a potential to be harmful to the body over time. You can have great posture with pain and an ill-functioning body. In which case, the pain may be stemming from something on a deeper level like an entrapped nerve or an irritated organ. Conversely, it’s certainly possible to have poor posture and have a very efficient functioning body with no pain. What’s most common however is that if your posture is off, it’s a strong indicator that you have some type of compensation going on in your body that needs to be addressed so that your body can function at a more efficient level. As a Rolfer servicing Bellevue, Seattle & Tacoma, I will review your posture and ask those bigger questions to find where the true source of the issue is coming from in the body.

Want to Schedule a Session, Click Here

Clients receive Rolfing from me to improve posture from all over the Puget Sound, including: Bellevue, Seattle, Renton, Redmond, Mercer Island, Kirkland, Lynnwood, Issaquah, Tacoma, Puyallup, Newcastle, Gig Harbor, Fircrest, & University Place.