My walking program began after watching students walk into my yoga classes with poor posture and movement patterns and then spend an hour and a half employing all of the good posture cues that I offer; only to walk right back into their poor patterns the second class ends.
My yoga classes can be kind of odd. I’d like to think they are fun but they can often descend into being a harangue about correct alignment and anatomy. The other night after class, a woman who was clearly a dancer, complimented me about the class and my emphasis on posture and anatomy.
After thanking her I asked her the question that I want to ask all dancers, “Why do you stand and walk like a dancer when you aren’t dancing?” This is something that I have never understood. Dancers build their bodies for performance and then tend to live in that body 24/7 not thinking that their daily posture might not be the same as their performance posture.
Good posture is not living in turn out with the inner thighs splayed open and the pelvis tucked under, which isn’t to say that is every dancers alignment, but it is a pretty common situation. While those traits might be imperative for performance, that are not particularly useful for life.
We should stand and walk with our feet moving towards parallel, with our pelvis untucked and our bones stacked in a line. This is the ideal that I think everyone should be looking to achieve and though it takes hard work and a lot of effort, the payoff of having good posture is worth it.
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