More thoughts on Posture








By choosing to contract into the pattern of tension on purpose the client regains cortical control of all the musculature involved.  Patterns of muscular contraction are primary, as this is how the brain reflexes are expressed. Groups of muscles, contracting into general, observable and consistent full body patterns. These voluntary muscular contractions, into the full body pattern, send new sensory information all the way to the sensorimotor cortex, the learning part of the brain. Once the client has cortical control of the musculature involved in the pattern, they can sense it, ‘feel’ it contracting, they now have three options available to them;





3 thoughts on “More thoughts on Posture”

  1. Hi Debs, I found this interesting. What do you think? Love, Ma

    On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:19 AM, The Somatic Movement wrote:

    > cgmd1 posted: “Posture is the upright organisation of the body in gravity. > It is how we hold ourselves when we are not actively thinking about it. > Therefore posture is a subconscious process. Hence why telling someone to > ‘Stand up straight!’ is an exercise in futility. ” >


  2. YES! I’ve been a PT for almost 25 years, and this is one of my pet peeves. I do not use the terms “good” or “bad” for posture, because not only are they poor descriptors, but they are intensely value-driven, judgmental terms that play more into people’s idea of being either productive (good) or lazy (bad); and it’s so easy to debunk the silly myth of being “straight” as having “correct” posture: as soon as you go out of “straight”, is it no longer “correct”? Obviously that makes no sense, since that would mean you never moved. So then, then how much out of “straight” can one go before posture is no longer “correct”? A millimeter? A centimeter? What’s the cut off? Clearly, this is also an absurd exercise, since you can’t even define the limits (most people would probably just say that, identifying what is “bad posture”, like the US Supreme Court’s stance on pornography, they know it when they see it). So the ortholinear concept isn’t really valid intrinsically.

    For myself, I have always seen posture as a dynamic response of the organism to living vertically in gravity. Meaning that sometimes it serves to sit more vertically aligned (e.g. when typing a t computer), and other times to “schlump” (like on the couch at the end of the day). The point is not to conform to some neurotic, abstract ideal, but rather to “live” in one’s body with a degree of consciousness that allows one to feel what is going on and to adjust / adapt accordingly. So if one is reflexively biased into chronic flexion, then the goal is to figure out why, and start to work on a person’s ability to live there when they chose to, and not live there when they chose not to (this “closing” can be conscious or somewhat “sub” conscious). The other piece to consider is that if they have some sort of somatic dysfunction / restrictions that need to be treated out specifically via a manual therapy approach, meaning that there may be some things that even with increased awareness, movement therapy, etc that they just can’t work out themselves (which I think is the exception, rather than the norm, but also a bit of MT can help ‘jump start” the awareness process sometimes more efficiently than if the client does it on their own – it just depends…).

    Anyway, great article. Thanks 🙂


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