The Best Way to Assess Your Own Posture
“Breathe in, breathe out, relax and let you body slump.” As ABC™ chiropractors we can say these words up to a hundred times a day. Have you ever asked yourself why we do this? The reason is it’s the best measure of your body structure (other than x-rays) that we know of. So what does it mean?
Quite simply, we are assessing your resting posture. Why resting posting? Because your ‘posture’ is the result of your muscles subconsciously trying to pull, lift, tip or twist you that way. But what happens when you stop trying and just let it all go? The answer can be very telling about the health of your physical body.
An ideal body is one that requires no effort to hold itself into an upright and balanced posture. When your bones are aligned in the right way, your body doesn’t require muscles to do the work. As a consequence your body stays nice and upright when you let it relax. It does this without tension and with ease. A good analogy is the game Jenga. When the bricks are moved out of position the tower becomes unstable. The more pieces that are out of place, then more unstable it becomes. Eventually is becomes so unbalanced that one final piece out of place will cause the tower to topple. This is very similar to our body except one significant difference…. muscles. We can use our muscles to help stop us from toppling. The result instead is a body that needs to twist, bend, slump etc in order to re-balance. Eventually that becomes so hard work for us that these twists and bends cause problems within themselves. So how do we know if this is occurring? You guessed it. “Breathe in, breathe out, relax and let you body slump.”
The slump test gives us a window into how much misalignment and imbalance is occurring in your body. We can not only see how much but where it’s occurring and what the potential health effects of that might be.
Not only is the slump test a useful tool for us in assessing your body but it can be useful for you as well. Many of our long term clients are so familiar with the slump test, they can tell when they need to be adjusted. Some will even be able to point out specific areas they can see are slumping and need to be adjusted! It can be incredibly empowering to know your body that well that you can self assess accurately.
Going a step further the slump test can also help you measure the impact of your environment on your body. People will often ask us “should I be doing so and so.” The best answer I can give is “if you feel more slumped after any activity then it probably has misaligned your body.” For example if you want to know if a certain gym exercise if causing problems, then do the slump test before and after. If it’s worse after then it just created problems for you. Even shoes, pillows, mattresses, couches, office chairs can all be assessed this way. As practitioners we do this all the time. You too can learn to self assess in the same way.
If you want to learn more ask us next time you’re in for an adjustment. It’s a skill but one worth learning.
There is no need to put up with pain any longer
Schedule your first appointment with our expert ABC™ Chiropractors and get back to doing what you love.
Schedule your first appointment with our expert ABC™ Chiropractors and get back to doing what you love