Poor Posture Headaches

poor posture headachesA ridiculous amount of people suffer from headaches. The numbers if they are to be believed are unfathomable. According to the National Headache Foundation, via Web MD, over 45 million Americans suffer from chronic, recurring headaches and of these, 28 million suffer from migraine.

There are as many as 150 classifications of headaches on record. Poor posture headaches can be directly related and these fall into the category of tension headaches which are the most common form of headache for adults.

Learning to walk and stand correctly can have a positive effect on muscle tension headaches and client after client has reported a decrease in what were sometimes years of chronic headaches.

Life is hard enough to process with the amount emotional stress we have to deal with. When we combine emotional turbulence with the physical stress of poor movement and posture patterns that make the body work far more than it needs to, it is no surprise that headaches are so common.

A happy head sits directly on top of the spine immediately above the shoulders; if this is the case the muscles of the head and neck are aligned and balanced—tension free.

Forward head posture, which is all too common, creates nothing but tension in the muscles connecting the head to the spine as the head gets heavier and heavier with every fraction of an inch it moves forward.

Do you know how much you love it when someone rubs out that deep tension in your neck and shoulders? Those muscles feel that way because of how hard they are overworking to hold the forward head up.

Even though the pain is in your head, the rest of the skeleton also bears responsibility for what is happening. Typical postural misalignments that increase tension include hyperextension of the knees, thighs leaning forward, the upper body rounding backwards and the head extending forward.

Changing the way you walk, stand and use your psoas—which requires little more than a lot of repetition— can have far reaching effects when it comes to muscle and joint issues including relief from muscle tension headaches.

 

Just last week a client mentioned to me how his headaches have diminished and he is not the first one. Here is a testimonial:

Insanely clever about the body, Jonathan took all the things I was learning in yoga about the physiology of movement and taught me how to integrate them into my everyday life–by re-teaching me how to walk. Highly intuitive about movement, CoreWalking is part of the reason I have many fewer headaches.

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