Posture is a habit. Your body will adapt to the position you hold it in. Muscles and joints will mold around that position.
In our society we spend most of the day in a seated position. We sit for commuting, we sit at work all day, we sit in the car on the way home, and finally sit on a comfy couch - all internal rotation of the shoulders and head forward posture.
Starting in college we spend more time than ever seated behind a laptop. Carrying a laptop or tablet has become a requirement for school. Hours are spent in auditorium style seats that are not designed to allow you to work on a computer. This forces you to mold yourself to your computer and chair and sacrifice your neck and back in the process. Finally we graduate and enter the workforce where we spend 8+ hours behind our workstation. Welcome to the rest of your working career! Spending this amount of time in poor posture is a recipe for pain, tightness, and discomfort in the neck and shoulders with headaches, upper and lower back. If you spend 8 hours a day teaching your neck, shoulders, and back to be tight and stiff, you’ll likely need to spend a lot of time outside of work trying to loosen it up.
Sports chiropractors like Dr. Alyx and Dr. Steve at Boulder Sports Chiropractic can help with posture.
Using movement and posture analysis we create a plan to loosen muscles and get joints moving. Often years of poor posture can lead to feeling bound down or locked in bad posture. Your attempts to sit with good posture feel painful and impossible to hold for more than a few minutes. The muscles of your neck and shoulders feel permanently knotted. Scar tissue and muscle adhesions or knots create an endless feeling of tightness. These muscles attach to joints of the spine creating excessive stress on the joints.
How do we fix your posture?
First, we use a number of tools to decrease muscle tension and break up muscle knots. We have a few great tools to do that - Active Release Technique, Graston Technique, dry needling, and class 4 laser therapy.
Second, we use precise joint mobilizations to restore normal joint movement. This helps restore normal range of motion and eliminates that feeling of stiffness.
Lastly, we give you a series of stretches, mobility exercises, and strengthening exercises to help you hold normal posture!
If you’re struggling with holding normal posture, call today for a Chiropractic Care appointment. After a thorough evaluation of your posture, we will make a plan to get you moving better, feeling better, and standing taller!