How can you improve your posture?
Wearing minimalist shoes can significantly help improve your posture. This is because traditional shoes raise the heel anywhere from 14-25mm, whereas zero-drop or minimal-drop shoes can range from 0-6mm on average. A more flexible sole may seem counterintuitive, however, the supple footbed does not restrict the foot’s natural movement and encourages full range of motion not just of the feet, but also the hips, knees, ankles, and pelvis. When you switch to minimalist shoes, it’s likely that you’ll start to notice improved posture when you stand or walk, as well as reduced pain in the back, knees, and hips.
Andrea Canavan from Lems Shoes
What are the long-term risks of bad posture?
Stresses on the body’s internal processes, hunching over will put pressure on the abdomen area and the chest, which will lead to poor digestion. Limiting oxygen supply is also a factor in poor posture, when you open your body out, it allows your body to breathe in more effectively reaching the vital organs. Bad posture over time will lead to a misaligned spine, known as vertical subluxation. This means the spinal discs are prone to degrade, constriction to blood vessels and you’re more likely to be linked to conditions such as arthritis in different areas of the body such as the knees. Over time stress and strain to bones, joints, and ligaments is very common.
Max Swire from Back Pain Help
What are the most common posture related issues?
The most common posture related symptoms are lower back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, hip pain, and knee pain. Posture imbalances cause these symptoms are thoracic flexion (rounding of the upper back), forward head posture, swayback (hips forward of the ankles and shoulders behind the hips), and anterior pelvic tilt (pelvis tilted down in the front). When addressing these posture imbalances to help eliminate pain and improve performance, it is important to treat the body as a unit. This means even if someone has forward head posture and neck pain, we don’t want to just focus on the head and neck but look at the rest of the body to figure out the underlying cause of the forward head posture. In this case, we will often see thoracic flexion and swayback posture. Swayback posture is usually caused by weakness in the hip and pelvic muscles and because of this weakness the hips don’t have the strength to support the spine and upper body. This causes the hips to move forward and the upper back to take over the stability work of the body.
Matt Whitehead from Oregon Exercise Therapy
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