Health benefits of good posture is there such a thing?
I'll explain am doctor Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to
truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. What are
the health benefits of a good posture? Why do people tell you to straighten up?
Why did your mommy said don't slouch, sit up straight,
walk straight, stand straight. Why does that matter? Well your mom wasn't so far
off the mark there. So first of all posture is determined by your brain in
every moment if your brain didn't send the signals to certain muscles and
decide to keep you in a certain place then you'd just be pile of meat and
bones on the floor and in any given moment about 90% of all the brain's
energy expenditure goes to regulating your posture to keep you moving and in
the right place in the field of gravity that's according to Roger Sperry you won
the Nobel price at one point so what is normal posture well from the front
anterior to posterior then you're supposed to have a straight spine all
the bones are supposed to be aligned shoulders were supposed to be level
heads supposed to be straight and there's not supposed to be any curves in
that spine now if you turn sideways now there's supposed to be three curves so in
the neck there supposed to be an anterior curve in the ribcage in the
chest there supposed to be a posterior curve or kyphosis and in the lumbar area
there supposed to be an anterior curve or lordosis again so these are three
curves that are normal and natural and necessary and babies they don't start
off with those curves they're born with just a single lordotic
posterior curve is just one big arch but then as they develop they start raising
their head and then get their cervical curve and then they start standing up
and these curves develop all the time when we look at the shoulders then we
look at it from the front and the arms are supposed to hang straight down and
your palms are supposed to face inward toward your body this is one of the most
common postural distortions even people who try to stretch and keep a good
posture you see almost all of them are gonna have their palms facing backward
and that means they have an anterior a flexor dominance which is a stress
response so a good posture when you have balance between your internal and your
external rotators then your palms are going to be facing in towards your body
when your arms are hanging relaxed so the thing to understand though we said
that 90% of the brain's expenditure is related to posture well the brain only
responds to information the vast majority of what the brain does is it
receives information it processes and it responds so what that means is that the
brain controls the body but the body sends an equal amount of information to
the brain so if most of the brain's output is
relating to posture that means most of the brain's input is relating to posture
and why is that important because every cell in your body operates on the
principle of use-it-or-lose-it if you work out a muscle it gets
stronger if you stop if you hurt your arm you put it in a cast then that
muscle atrophies very very quickly the same thing holds true for the brain so
if you don't feed your brain signals from the body then that brain is going
to atrophy so if we understand that a proper posture promotes movement that
these fine little adjustments of posture and movement that
the brain makes all the time that that's the output that's corresponding to an
equal amount of input then we understand that a proper posture feeds the brain
and I think you would agree that the brain is a good thing to have and the
longer we live the more important it becomes because one of the most
important factors in aging and slowing aging is to keep the brain healthy so
posture plays a huge role in that one interesting thing to consider also
is what's called the sub occipital muscles so that's right underneath the
skull bone up here in the upper cervical and the top of the neck those two bones
are called the atlas and the axis and in Greek mythology the that god Atlas was
the one who held up the world and in your body the atlas is what holds up
your head and your brain and because it is so incredibly important that has
specific muscles associated with it that have more receptors that have a greater
participation in the input to your brain than any other bone or any other muscles
in your body and these muscles there are several of them and they're so tiny that
they're not supposed to do work some muscles in your body like your the
quadriceps and your biceps they're big strong muscles they're supposed to do
work but other muscles are more about signaling the smaller the muscle is the
more important it becomes for fine motor control and in some cases not even motor
control but just sensory because muscles have a huge sensory input to the brain
there's muscle spindles in the muscles their sole purpose is to send
information to the brain and in the suboccipital muscles there are more of
these receptors and more of these spindle cells than anywhere else in the
body now here's the point when we have a bad
posture then when we have when the head juts forward when we get a little bit of
anterior head carriage now those muscles get put under chronic constriction under
chronic tension meaning they're a little bit tight all the time and that means
that they are not fulfilling their purpose of signaling now they're just
sitting that in a constant static contraction and they can't signal they
can't feed the brain the the way that they're supposed to so as soon as we get
a little bit of anterior head carriage we lose one of the most important
feedback mechanisms for the brain so this is why that's so important with
good posture because in ideal posture when everything is balanced and stacked
the way that it's supposed to we move better and we signal better and the
brain gets healthier this is one of the reasons that you can notice that posture
even affects mood that people who feel great they stand up straight they stand
tall they have great posture people who don't
feel so good people are depressed people are stressed you start seeing how their
posture declines so work on your posture there's a video here about three winged
friends and we also have a video on some neck stretches make this a daily routine
so that you can maintain your posture pay attention to how you stand and move
because it matters please share this video with as many people as you can
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