iHunch, Text Neck, iPosture

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​Interesting article in the NYTimes entitled Your iPhone is Ruining your Posture and Your Mood.

It makes some good points about how posture affects mood.  And makes just a few great points about how cell phones cause us to hunch or stick our heads forward or just get in contorted poor positions.  

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Amy Cuddy author of the piece and professor at Harvard Business School ends with: 

"...... we rely on our mobile devices far too much to give them up, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Fortunately, there are ways to fight the iHunch.
Keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your phone, even if that means holding it at eye level. You can also try stretching and massaging the two muscle groups that are involved in the iHunch — those between the shoulder blades and the ones along the sides of the neck. This helps reduce scarring and restores elasticity."

In our blog article, Exercise, Posture Myths, thinking you can make your body stand up straight or can make your rounded shoulders unround or make your forward head actually come back over your spine is a colossal waste of time and energy.  

​Myth #1: Thinking about your posture is enough. 
Truth: Postural alignment is unconscious and based on our muscle memory. Thinking about your posture is not enough to correct your imbalances and even if you could, what happens to your posture when you get distracted?

Everyone thinks they are posture experts these days including Business School Profs.  It is great to see the important subject of posture in the media.  However, thinking your way to correct posture, telling yourself even reminding yourself with your Apple Watch or cell phone alarm to "stand up straight" "keep your head up" will result in more of the same posture.  

Muscles have memory.  Keep on habitually positioning your head, spine, pelvis, legs etc in the same position over and over, you are training your muscles to hold your bones that way.  No one else is responsible but you.  

Luckily the human body is a brilliant piece of adaptable genius in motion.  Muscles can move bones out of their ideal and healthy position and they can be trained to move bones BACK into their correct position strategically with the right methodology with Posture Alignment Therapy by an Egoscue University certified therapist.  

This type of retraining can not happen with gym machines, classes, in a Physical Therapy clinic and certainly not with surgery and DEFINITELY not with stretching, massaging and telling yourself to  "keep your head up."  

A forward head position and rounded shoulders are the byproduct of poor spinal positions, kyphotic upper back, flat lower bock, lost spinal curves to name a few.  Since the spine sits on top of the pelvic bowl, if the pelvis is tilted backward then all the efforts in the world to keep your head up will produce no change in head position, at all.  

Posture Alignment Therapy is highly effective and will get the body back into correct position.  

Call us 772-559-1532 today for a consultation and to discuss your pain and posture, because the positions you have gotten your body in is what is causing the pain.