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Balancing & Alignment:
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You know that balancing your tires and keeping your car's wheels aligned improves the handling of your car and increases the longevity of your tires, right? Believe it or not, keeping your own body aligned and balanced improves the way you move, reduces fatigue, and increases the longevity of your body parts, too! Watch people walking by your office or around the campus and you will probably see a lot of them hunching along, staring at the ground with eyes down, head forward and shoulders rounded.
Take a walk down the hallway and glance into a few offices. You'll probably see many people slumped over their keyboards, reaching to the side for their mouse, or leaning sideways on armrests. We realize that you are probably deep in thought, but you are adding unnecessary miles onto your body. Posture is largely a matter of habit - being aware of your habits is the first step to correcting poor posture.
Awkward postures increase gravitational forces that pull on your neck and spine. Not only are you stressing the fragile bone structures of your spine and associated ligaments, but also the muscles must act like guywires to hold your body in these positions. Resulting muscle tension and fatigue is the cause of a great deal of pain for many people.
Over the years, awkward posture increases the strength of the muscles which pull you out of alignment and weaken the muscles which hold you upright, so that a slumped posture with rounded shoulders, hollow chest, and drooping head feels more and more natural to you. Not only that, but internal organs are often compressed, interfering with their necessary functioning.
Did you know that your head weighs 10-18 pounds? As much as a bowling ball! A neutral posture where the head is aligned with the hips, while sitting, standing, or walking, means that this bowling ball (your head) is perfectly balanced on top of your neck. Each inch that you tilt your head away from this perfect balance adds approximately 10 pounds to the load of your head, due to gravity. In addition, extending your arms adds to the load. So if you are in a slumped position with your arms extended, the load on your body can add up to 150 pounds! If you think you are more relaxed when you are slumping, think again. Your body is working overtime; no wonder you end up with tight shoulder, neck, and back muscles!
Research by the Noelle Perez of the Institute D'Aplomb in Paris has shown that people of many other cultures such as Portugal, Costa Rica, and Bali, have less than 5% occurrence of back pain. In contrast, 80% of Americans will suffer from debilitating back pain during their lifetime. The common thread among pain-free cultures is the difference in posture.1 From this study, the Balance Center in Palo Alto has developed a course which retrains our body postures and movements to facilitate decreased tension and increased mental and physical energy. Call (650) 856-2000 or sign up via their website (www.balancecenter.com). Their classes are offered at their Palo Alto and Berkeley locations.
Techniques that teach "neutral" postures to enable people to live without the stress caused by muscle tension have been developed over the past 100 years. People learn to move, walk, and sit in a new way so that gravitational forces on their body are minimized. The effort to simply "exist" is greatly reduced so that you feel lighter and more energetic, and the sources of pain from misalignment are reduced or eliminated. The Alexander Technique proposes that injury, illness, and mental, physical, or emotional bad habits disrupt the appropriate flow of information between your mind and muscles. It is possible to restore an optimal connection between body and mind through gentle nonmanipulative touch and verbal instruction.2,3 A similar technique, Trager Work, is based on the premise that discomfort, pain, and reduced functionality are physical symptoms of accumulated tension resulting from accidents, weak posture, fear, emotional blockages, and daily stress. In this technique, a practitioner gently rocks and lengthens the client's body to release tension, and provides movement lessons for continued self-care.2 To find practitioners of these techniques, refer to the websites of the American Center for the Alexander Technique4, Theta Network5, or the United States Trager Association.6
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