Postural habits are as much a part of a personality as is facial expression. 

If you are walking in your local shopping mall and look down the concourse often times you can identify someone you know simply because of their posture, their gait pattern, or simply just the way they carry themselves.  They could be 100 to 200 feet away and you would be able to identify them by one of those characteristics, even though you couldn’t possibly see their face. 

Therefore, if one would think that changing posture is an easy feat or one worth the effort, consider the effort and rate of success of actually trying to change somebody’s personality. 

Doesn’t work too well does it? 

Key Point:  When treating the vast majority of neck and back pain if one optimizes and makes painless the sleeping position and sitting position through use of proper positioning and adaptive supports, one can minimize the provocative effects of long term faulty positional strain.  That in and of itself should be a sufficient goal for postural intervention.  However, one can address the muscles of postural support through therapeutic exercise in an attempt to recondition them in a way that will reduce their proclivity to fatigue quickly.

In the example of the patient with a shoulder impingement, if this person had had no certain mechanism of injury, yet sits in front of a computer 6 hours a day or more and demonstrates a forward head posture when sitting, simply adding a small pillow of some sort behind their mid to upper thoracic spine when sitting would be a useful and surprisingly effective strategy towards reducing the strain from such a posture.  Doing so will bring the shoulder girdle forward and upwards thereby reducing the strain at the cervical spine and cervico-thoracic junction by the head’s own natural righting reflex.  There will be less strain on the supportive soft tissue and joint capsules and consequently less pain. 

Clinically one can then use whatever manual techniques to improve mobility to the area and reinforce it with neuromuscular reeducation and therapeutic prescriptive strengthening. 

Continue reading for more insight.

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