If I was in real estate, my mantra would be “location, location, location”. In the field of fitness, it needs to be “posture, posture, posture”. As someone who does not naturally have good posture, I am amazed, and a little worried in fact, about the implications of bad posture. Not only does posture effect fitness performance, it can also be a precursor to injury if it is not properly aligned.

Bad posture is really an alignment problem. Dr Rothbart, author of Forever Free from Chronic Pain, uses the analogy of a car to explain the posture issue. He says that when the suspension of a car is unevenly distributed across surfaces of the tires, some parts receive more weight than other parts. This causes the tires to wear unevenly. The thread is worn down until performance is affected. In the same way, when we have bad posture, our body’s weight is unevenly distributed across the joint surfaces of our ankles,knees, hips, back, neck and jaw. Some of these joints receive more weight than others, causing them to wear unevenly. Ultimately this affects efficiency and performance, and can even eventually cause chronic pain. [Read more…]