Summer is winding down and it's back to school time. Going back to school presents several challenges for students of different ages that can negatively affect their posture and health. Here are the challenges preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, and college/graduate school students face and how to combat them:

In celebration of National Golf Month this August, I am offering free 30-minute golf specific posture evaluations. Sign up by contacting me and requesting a golf specific evaluation. ​

Idiopathic means of unknown cause and often of spontaneous origin. Idiopathic back pain is back pain that doctors cannot explain because there is not obvious structural cause of the pain like a herniated disc, degenerative disc disease, or stenosis. Idiopathic back pain is the "diagnosis" given by doctors to patients that have chronic (over 6 months) back pain and they have been unable to figure out why. There is always a reason why however...

Chronic back pain can be very debilitating and often all you want is to find a way to make your pain go away. ​

Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, was in that place in 2015 when after rupturing a disc in his back he just wanted the pain to go away and was told surgery would fix his problem. Before surgery Kerr's pain was so bad that he couldn't walk more than 30 yards without needing to stop and sit down. He described it as "getting old." 

I think his injury and pain had nothing to do with his age and can't be blamed on "getting old".

What is the psoas? Psoas (pronounced SO-az) is a muscle that gets a lot of attention for playing a role in back pain, hip function, spinal function, and sports performance and is often referred to as "the most important muscle in the body." Quite a claim for a muscle none of us can see and very few people really understand.

A new study published in the journal Arthritis Care & Research wanted to look at the question of whether there is an association between a history of running and symptomatic knee osteoarthritis. The study looked at over 2,600 people with an average age of 64 years old, of which about 30% had run at some point in their lives. The researchers evaluated the relationship of running with knee pain, radiographic osteoarthritis (OA), and symptomatic OA. 

Fitness trainer Nate Helming from The Run Experience made a video where he talks about head and hip position and how it affects your running. Faulty head and hip position will negatively affect your running performance and can lead to injury just as bad shoulder posture does. Nate shares some good knowledge and tips including:

"Good posture is the key to everything" and my head, low and behold, is attached to the rest of my spine." Both are things I've taught every client, Egoscue University student, and Posture Alignment Specialist I've worked with over the last 15 years.

Nate talks about how you should not hold your phone while looking at it and you can clearly see this is terrible posture:

Headaches are no fun. Tension headaches can really hurt. Migraine headaches can incapaciate us. But what do headaches have to do with posture?

Headaches can have a lot to do with posture. Headaches, like all pain, are messages from the body. These messages are not usually telling us something is broken, but rather something needs our attention, something is getting overloaded, something is out of alignment, and/or something is missing. ​

Interactive posture analysis of lower body postural alignment.
Anyone who is going through Egoscue University to become a Posture Alignment Specialist (PAS) or Advanced Exercise Therapist (AET), attending The National Posture Institute to become a Certified Posture Specialist (CPS), taking classes at the American Posture Institute to become a Certified Posture Expert (CPE), anyone wanting to become a Certified Posture Exercise Professional (CPEP) from PostureZone.com, or someone attending the Posture Restoration Institute with the goal of being Posture Restoration Certified (PRC) needs to understand posture. Anyone doing postural alignment analysis needs to understand what good, correct, or ideal posture looks like, what common posture imbalances are, and what causes those posture imbalances. 
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Oregon Exercise Therapy is happy to help you in your posture knowledge and application by offering  interactive posture analysis of different areas of the body. 

Look at the person below and evaluate his posture. Put your answers to the following questions in the comments section below this post to start a discussion about this posture and how it is affecting this client. 

What jumps out to you? What is not in good/ideal alignment? 

How would this posture affect his movement, function, and performance? 

What injuries might this person be susceptible to based on his misalignments?

​What do you think caused these misalignments?

What would you have this person do to correct his posture?

Related articles/videos:
Children's postural alignment
Benefits of postural alignment therapy
Orthopedic doctor and postural alignment specialist discuss osteoarthritis
The chicken or the egg in pain and posture

Stand up, step in place several times, and then stop and look down at your feet.

• What direction are they pointing?
• Is one foot turned out more than the other foot?
• Is one foot in front of the other foot?
• Close your eyes and feel the weight distrobution in your feet; are you putting more weight in one foot than the other foot?