Childhood posture is a subject more and more parents are taking an interest. Good posture is very important in the pre-school child. Our children end up modeling our posture, so if you want your children to have good posture, you need to fix yours first.
During the initial four years of life there is a quick development and increase in postural responses, which relapses until adult postural reflexes are reached at the age of 7-10 years of age. Consequently, the comprehension is that the most training in static posture and its dynamic reflexes happens during the early pre-school years of life.
Studies have demonstrated that low back pain regularly starts in childhood, with 10% of 9-10 year olds experiencing it, with poor stance being one of the primary driver. They have likewise demonstrated that preparation in great stance from an early age does diminish the predominance of low back pain in youngsters.
Bad posture can bring about weight on the spine at specific levels. For example the slumped position can put a ton of unnecessary loading on the center back spinal region, which can lead to extending forward of the head and jaw. This then prompts headaches and the failure to focus and concentrate. Poor posture likewise can put strain on the lower back. Now a days substantial school packs and youngsters sitting throughout the day makes it no big of a surprise to us that kids are suffering with posture pain.
The human body has a great ability to adapt to stress. Stress in this context means both physical stress – our habitual ways of sitting, moving, standing, and the exercise that we do (or don’t) do; but also mental and emotional stress. Mental and emotional stress has an impact on the physical structure of the body that can exacerbate existing postural difficulties that lead to pain and imbalance.
Our chiropractic practitioner here in Clinic 27 are fundamentally concerned with helping correct bad posture. In the event that your youngster or a kid you know suffers from poor posture, don’t hold up. The issue will just worsen after some time and be harder to alter. Know that we can push our bodies beyond what seems possible, if we commit to doing so.
Want to know more about Chiropractors Sydney CBD? We may be able to help you at our practice section here in Clinic 27.
Our children end up modeling our posture, so if you want your children to have good posture, you need to fix yours first. I hope that by the end of this book, you’ll realise that simply trying to hold your body upright doesn’t work.
In this chapter, I’m going to answer the question that I get asked the most by people coming into my practice: “How can my body go so wrong?”
Weak muscles don’t lead to bad posture. It’s the body’s structure that leads to bad posture.
From the day we are born, our bodies are under stress. The first thing that happens to us whilst being born is that we are usually handled out of the birth canal using our head. Some have the misfortune of being pulled out by forceps or by suction tubes, known as ventouses.
This is a trauma that the majority of us can adapt to and compensate for later in life. At other times, the trauma needs to be released from the body so that the structure can reintegrate.
After birth, as we develop and grow, we embark on all of the body learning that we need to do to learn the physical skills that we need: holding our heads up, sitting, crawling, and walking. All of this involves trial and error – and a few bumps along the way. Most of us have patterns of compensation that stem from even this early time, when we’ve perhaps been learning to walk and fallen, pushing the body out of alignment in the process.
Of particular interest to me is how the body affects your thoughts and confidence. Physical posture is one of a handful of cues that can affect your emotional state and behaviour. We all know confident people are more upright. But there is even more to it than that. Some interesting research appears in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology. The article I’m talking about was written about research that showed how body posture affects confidence in your own thoughts. The students were asked to sit up or slump down whilst undertaking a business study, which supposedly investigated factors contributing to job satisfaction and professional performance.
The end result of this was that when students wrote positive thoughts about themselves, they rated themselves more highly when in the upright rather than the slouched posture because the upright posture led to confidence in the positive thoughts.
However, when students wrote negative thoughts about themselves, they rated themselves more negatively in the upright than the slouched posture because the upright posture led to more confidence in their negative thoughts. In a separate experiment, the researchers repeated the same scenario with a different group of students, but afterwards asked them a series of questions about how they felt during the course of the study.
“These participants didn’t report feeling more confident in the upright position than they did in the slouched position, even though those in the upright position did report more confidence in the thoughts they generated.”