Weekly musings, 2/12/17: position

Weekly musings, 2/11/17:Position

A client came in a few weeks ago. I asked her how she was doing. “Good, but I’m having a little bit of mid-back pain when I sit for long periods of time,” (one of her hobbies requires long periods of sitting). 

“Can you alter your position when you begin to feel uncomfortable to a place that’s less painful?”

“But won’t that affect my posture?”

I used to be guilty of thinking there was a perfect position, that one posture was, in some way, better than another. (I am going to go out on a limb and guess our ancestors never thought about their posture. Many of them also died before the age of fifty and were probably too busy trying to survive the harshness of the environment and famine to ponder if they were standing the “right” way). 

This seeped into the way I trained people, as I tried to put everyone into the same box, ignoring the fact the “best” posture doesn’t really exist as long as movement is coordinated and load is well distributed.

Fortunately, my days of being the posture police are in the past. The next time the client came in and I asked her how she was doing, she answered, “you know your suggestion about shifting positions if I felt my mid back get achy? It helped.”

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March, 2017 newsletter: learning from others

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Weekly musings, 2/7/17: the sum of the parts