Get Busy Rising or Get Busy Falling

If you did "time lapse" photography of your daily desk posture you would be horrified.

When it comes to your posture, you are either going up, or you are going down - there is no staying the same. Although it can appear like you are staying on the same level, or "it's not that bad yet..."

In reality what is happening is your posture is slowly going down, getting a little bit worse every day, but changing so slowly you’re not able to notice. The mirror just shows who you are today, not where you came from and where you are going. It is just a frozen snapshot in time of an ongoing downward process.

If you did "time lapse" photography of your daily desk posture you would be horrified.

You know those videos which show the plants and flowers growing, blossoming, slowly expanding? Well your posture might look more like one where all the plants are drooping, contracting, slowly dying.

Each day you feel uncomfortable, and are fidgeting in your seat a lot, but it was like this yesterday and the day before too and so it just seems the same as that. Unless something big happens, like an injury, then it can be easy to keep on deceiving yourself into thinking that it is just the same as before, so nothing to worry about yet.

Why You Are Going Down

The reason you are going down is because of your habitual movement patterns, which you learned as a young child figuring out how to stand and walk, and are now still coordinated together in the same way, and happening "all by themselves." This is all mostly subconscious. You probably have no idea which body part moves first when you stand or sit. Who decided all this? A 3year old child!

Posture is made up of many movements all happening at the same time. Standing up or sitting down might feel like one movement to you - and sitting still might even feel like you are not moving at all - but really there are many sub-movements of different parts. For example the pelvis, the ribcage, the shoulders, are all moving forward or back, up or down relative to one another. Through a lifetime of habit they now all synchronise together into a larger movement - which to you now feels like the correct and only way.

Most of these sub-movements happen out of your awareness and they follow the same general pattern every time. You have a collection of movements habits synchronised together into a larger movement habit, we call this posture, or "sitting at the desk" but really it is movements you are doing.

These are not simply "physical" habits but also "mental" habits.

Or what is better to call your PsychoPhysical Habits. These are the deep habits of thought, feeling, sensations & movements that result in your current posture. If you don't make some sort of intervention in this, to break up the habit and replace it with something else, then everything will continue in the same direction over and over again. And that direction is down.

Your posture is either going up - or it is going down. And it will continue in your current direction until you counteract the force of PsychoPhysical habit with a new series of sub-movements synchronised into what is now a new and different larger movement.

How to Start Going Up

Which sub-movements do you need to stop, and what movements should you do instead? This is the purpose of 1 to 1 sessions with me. Every person has their own unique "style" of posture and my role as teacher is to help you discover this for yourself, so you can learn to change it for yourself.

But you also need to learn a new way of thinking about movement in order to actually make lasting changes to your postural habits.

I will analyse your posture based on the sub-movements I see you doing - many of which you are not aware of, and some of which you can’t even feel - and then introduce a specific technique for synchronising all the new sub-movements I want to see you doing instead.

Over time you will create a new posture - a posture that is habitually going up instead of down.

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Would you like a Posture Consultation & Body Audit? I offer these consultations for free up front, and you can “choose your own price" after the session.