Massage Warsaw- Massage Therapy – Warsaw Acupuncture

Tag: posture

  • The Benefits of Yoga

    Yoga can be key to helping you recover from an injury, undo years of bad postural habits, or relieve your stress.

    Like few other exercises, yoga has the ability to get you focussing on breath, willing chronically tight muscles to loosen.  It creates a mind body awareness of how you are positioned and starts a dialogue between you and your body that will help you find physical cues of rising stress levels and enact change simply by thinking about it.

    This enhanced state relaxation is key to getting muscles to release.  One reason tight muscles stay tight is because of the pain-tension cycle.  Often there is nothing wrong with the muscle.  There is no damage, but the muscle simply won’t release because it is painful which is causing tightness, which causes more pain, which causes more tightness.  By destressing the person, focussing on the breathing, and entering certain positions, the pain-tension cycle can be broken and the muscle may find it easier to release.

    The positioning in yoga is unique and shows an ancient understanding of modern concepts such as anatomy trains.  Anatomy trains was pioneered by Tom Myers.  It shows that there are chains of fascial connections that link many muscles from the feet all the way to the head.  Basically, the fascia fascia on the soles of the feet is connected to the fascia of your calf muscles, which is connected to the fascia of your hamstrings, which is connected to the fascia of your glutes, which is connected to the fascia of the back’s erector muscles, which is connected to the fascia of the neck and head.  The advantage of yoga over traditional stretching is that traditional stretching focusses on stretching the fascia of one muscle at a time, while yoga stretches all the fascia of all the muscles in a given anatomy train at once.  This means that if a fascial restriction in your foot is leading to tightness in your lower back, yoga helps to address it.

    The yoga poses are also helpful because they are the opposite of the harmful postures we assume most of the day.  Daily work in front of your computer may cause you to slouch.  Yoga asks you to assume the opposite posture: chest open, shoulders back, head tall.  Daily work may have you sticking your gut out, while yoga asks you to suck in your belly and elongate your lower back while you tuck in your glutes.  By reversing the postures you can change what your body sees as normal and give your body time to repair itself.

    Yoga works.  Why not give it a try?

  • Yoga For Better Posture

    Even if you have had horrible posture for most of your life, you can still change it by taking the right steps today.  Yoga can be a valuable tool in correcting a long career of bad posture.  The following video shows a simple exercise that strengthens all of your erector muscles (the muscles that run beside your spine), interscapular muscles (the muscles that pull your shoulder blades together), and your lower trapezius muscles.  Strengthening these muscles can result in a straighter, stronger back, and a reduced slouch.

  • The Importance of Posture

    Here is a link to an excellent article on posture.  The author explains the following:

    The Benefits of Good Posture

    Makes You Look Taller.  Good posture adds an inch or two to your height.  Try it, you will be surprised.

    Makes You Look More confident.   Good posture gives you an air of strength and confidence.  Think about it… shoulders back, chest out, chin in….

    Improves Organ Function.  Slouching forces your rib cage to compress your organs decreasing their efficiency.

    Reduces Tension and Pain in Your Neck, Shoulders, and Back.  Most of the discomfort you get from sitting at work comes from sitting improperly.

    Increases Concentration and Mental Performance.

    Prevents Beer Belly.  The slouch accentuates any belly fat you have while proper posture hides it well.

     

     

  • Your Computer Is Hurting You

    The average person that comes in to see me is not an athlete, does not lift heavy objects, and cannot, for the life of them, understand why they are in so much pain. Truth is that you are more likely to suffer from that cushy desk job than from anything else.

    Simply sitting in front of a computer for hours on end day after day slowly but surely does some serious damage to the body.  Here is how:

    Headaches

    Look at the last picture of the evolution of posture.  Notice how forward the person’s head is; how his neck sort of sticks out; and how he seems to be reaching further towards the screen.  That head position that everyone uses today puts a huge load of stress on those teeny tiny suboccipital muscles that lie at the base of the skull.  These suboccipital muscles when they are irritated for too long respond by sending headache signals to the temples, the side of the head, the base of the skull.  It can almost feel like someone tightening a band around your head.  Ouch!

    Solution:

    1. Learn how to sit properly using basic ergonomic principles
    2. Keep your chin tucked in and stop inching your head toward the screen.  Perhaps it’s time to get a new glasses prescription or get a larger screen.

    Pain Between Your Shoulder Blades

    Notice how stretched forward his shoulders are?  How they kind of hunch forward and slouch?  This position keeps your chest muscles in a shortened, tight position, while stretching out the muscles in your upper back.  Yes, those rhomboid and trapezius muscles are being forced to work in a weakened, stretched out position.  They are also fighting a losing battle against tight, strong chest muscles.  The result is that the muscles between your shoulder blades will feel achy all the time.

    Solution:

    1. Stretch out your chest muscles, or try these chest stretches
    2. Strengthen your Upper Back Muscles with lat pulldowns, use a rowing machine, do any kind of lats workout

    Lower Back Pain

    Notice how the lower back is missing any kind of natural arch in this position?  See how it rounds forward?  This is reversing the natural lordotic curve of the lower back and puts extra pressure on the nerve and blood supply in the lower back.  Basically, pressure is being put on your discs (herniated disc, anyone?), nerves are starting to be pinched, and your lower back is starting to feel achy all over.

    Solution:

    1. Sit with your hips against the back of the seat and get a lumbar support

    Hip Pain

    All that constant sitting can be a pain in the butt.  The constant pressure compresses nerves and blood vessels.  It acts like a choke hold, preventing blood from flowing freely to the gluteal muscles.  A reduced blood supply means less nutrients and oxygen being pumped into your hip and leg muscles.  It also means that waste products are not being removed very effectively from your hips.

    Solution:

    1. Stretch out your hip muscles
    2. Learn these simple sitting exercises

  • Video: Shoulder Exercises for Improving Posture & Decreasing Chronic Pain

    Here is a video for some exercises for improving shoulder posture. It is definitely worth a try for people who haven’t had much luck with the traditional stretching exercises. Traditionally, to correct posture, we focus on increasing the length of shortened muscles or increasing the strength of weak muscles in an attempt to bring the body’s posture back to equilibrium. The technique proposed in this video focuses on awareness and activating. These gentle, almost effortless movements bring the participant’s attention to muscles that are often ignored. In this example, the participant activates her serratus anterior muscle, which is a small postural muscle whose weakness is often overcompensated for by larger muscle groups like the trapezius muscles. Teaching the participant to use her serratus anterior muscle results in a more evenly divided workload for the postural muscles, which in turn lead to better posture and reduced chronic pain. With the shoulder blade sitting better on the torso, the many neck muscles that originate from the torso or shoulder blade experience reduced stress.

    I tried the exercises myself on the weekend after a long bout of cycling (ie. sore neck and shoulders) and found instant relief.

    Enjoy the video.

  • Improve Your Shoulder Posture by Changing Your Workout

    One of the most important and long lasting ways to get rid of neck and shoulder pain is to change your posture.  I am sure that you have all heard it from your massage therapist, but, how can you change your posture after it’s been that way for decades?  The body has already been trained and it’s game over, right?

    Wrong!  Using the right fascial massage techniques, stretches and strength training can re-educate your body to develop and accept a new posture.  With postural re-education you will find more permanent results than simply trying to pull your shoulders back.

    Pace Yourself

    Firstly, understand that the change has to be gradual.  It can be next to impossible to change postural habits overnight.  Clients often feel like they have to change their posture instantly and that they are “failing” every time that they catch themselves falling into their old slouches.  I ask them to instead try to have good posture for a total of an hour a day for the first week and then gradually increase it.  This way they can understand that it is a gradual process and that they have a really good chance of succeeding.  Most will be able to do more than an hour a day and feel great about it.

    Strength Training for Posture

    The other approach is to start strengthening your muscles. Posture is only partly habit.  The rest of your posture depends on muscle balance.  The chest muscles (pectoralis major and pectoralis minor) pull the shoulder blades forward, while the back muscles (rhomboids, trapezius and latissimus dorsi) pull the shoulder blades back and toward the spine.  Most people are stronger in the chest than they are in the back, which is why they slouch forward.  Re-balancing your postural muscles involves stretching out the pectoral muscles and strengthening the back muscles.

    Start training your back muscles.

    By strengthening the upper back muscles, specifically the muscles that bring your shoulder blades together, you will find that your body with its balanced muscles will naturally and automatically go into the correct posture.  You won’t have to think about posture or make any real effort again.  The key exercises for strengthening these back muscles are lat pulldowns and rowing motions.

    Focus on Endurance

    The problem with pulling your shoulders back is that these muscles get tired as they lack endurance.  An 8 hour work day is a long time for these muscles to be working against the powerful chest muscles.  When strengthening your postural back muscles, build endurance by lowering the weight and working up to sets of 16 or more reps.

    Take it Easy on Your Chest

    Most people that work out love spending time on their pecs.  Guys love the strong, masculine look that big pecs give, while women like how it firms and lifts the breasts.  Remember though, that strong, short, tight pec muscles are a big reason for our bad posture.  These muscles shorten with repeated slouching and hunching over our computers.  Strengthening these muscles further shorten them and worsen our posture.  You can still work on your chest in a workout, but you will need to change your approach:

    1. Lower the weight you are using.
    2. If you can, leave the bench press alone and work the pec fly machine.  The pec fly works the pecs through its full range of motion including the stretched out end range.
    3. Stretch your pecs before and after every set.  Pec stretches will lengthen the pec muscles and keep them from going into spasm.

    A Second Look at the Elliptical

    Most people use the elliptical by powering through with their legs while their arms limply hold onto the handles and swing. This is good for cardio training and working the legs, but if you want to improve your posture and get rid of your neck pain, try using the elliptical in the following way.

    1. The key is to focus on what you are doing with your upper body.  Try to shift all the work from the legs to the upper body.  It may be difficult at first and you may need to alternate between focusing on the upper body and focusing on the lower body.
    2. There are 2 phases: pulling the handle back and pushing the handle forward.  To work your postural muscles, put all your effort into the pulling back phase while using the pushing forward phase to rest.
    3. When working the upper body, don’t let your arms do all the work.  Focus on your shoulder blade.  It should be either moving outward or pulling inward toward the centre of your back.  The more your shoulder blades are moving, the more you are working your postural muscles.
    4. When you pull back on the handle, try to pull your shoulder blade toward your spine.  This works the rhomboid, lats, and middle and lower traps: the postural muscles that pull your shoulders back.
    5. During the rest phase when the handle is going forward, don’t put too much effort on the arm, but try to distract your shoulder blade and slide it out and forward for a nice stretch.
    6. This exercise works great because there is a lot of repetition which builds  endurance in your postural muscles.  When those back muscles become as strong as or stronger than the front muscles your shoulders will automatically start pulling your shoulders back on their own.

    Good posture, naturally.