Perfect Posture Part 2: Breathe Fully
This is the second post of a series. Read part one here: Perfect Posture Part 1
To breathe fully is to give ourselves the best chance to have a healthy body and mind.
I have a lot of opinions about how we stand and walk that are contrary to many commonly held beliefs.
I think that we shouldn’t thrust our chests forward and pull our shoulders back which many people think is an essential part of good posture.
I am very anti-pelvis tucking which is what gets taught in an overwhelming majority of exercise classes.
For the most part, people agree with me when I describe how the body is meant to work.
- The bones hold you up.
- The muscles move you.
- The nerves tell the muscles to move the bones.
This is as simple as I can make it and I am always trying to make things simple.
When it comes to breathing, I think that the design of the body is such that when we breathe in and out the entire trunk should be involved.
Ideally, the belly should distend ever so slightly when the diaphragm muscle descends on the inhale.
Usually, when I ask someone to pay attention to how they breathe, they’ll notice a tendency to expand and lift the chest as the primary action.
The majority of people I meet and work with are chest breathers due to poor posture. The alignment of their spine interrupts the ability of the diaphragm to descend.
This is a case of the bones that should be holding us up being misaligned.
For the breath to move through the whole trunk the bones need to be well aligned, especially the spine.
Most people need to bring the front of the ribcage down a little to create the necessary space for the diaphragm to drop.
Open The Middle Back
This means lengthening the back of the spine a little or broadening the middle back.
Unfortunately, people don’t always like the place where this adjustment lands them.
It can feel like doing this forces the head forward and this might be the case but it is a better option than not to breathe fully.
The essence of good posture is a search for balance between flexion and extension.
We tend to be very tight in the back of the body and loose in the front.
If this is the case the adjustment I described to let the body breathe fully is easy to accomplish at the front but often difficult at the back.
The spinal muscles are often way tighter than the abdominal muscles and this makes balancing the front and back of the body more complicated.
Also, tightness at the back of the body, where we are trying to lengthen can cause strain on the head and neck as well as the brain.
Perception is very powerful as well because if people think that they look bad in some way they won’t want to do it, even if they don’t actually look bad.
Forward head posture doesn’t make people happy.
Posturally, you can have your cake and eat it too if you are willing to commit to opening the back of the body and creating an environment where you breathe fully. It just takes some conscious work.
The body is designed to breathe fully and everything else should be secondary to that goal.
Find the full breath and rearrange your body around that.
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