Improving Posture and Movement for Lasting Wellness – An Exclusive Interview with Luther Lockard
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Luther Lockard is a professional bodyworker with 27 years of experience, which includes the services of Posture & Alignment Coaching, flexibility training, personal training, medical massage, reflexology, craniosacral, Reiki, therapeutic touch, healing touch, and other energy-based modalities. Luther has over 2000 hours of professional training in bodywork, which includes Brain-Based & Corrective Exercise Movement Coaching.
Luther Lockard, Posture & Movement Coach, LMT
Who is Luther Lockard?
My name is Luther Lockard, Posture and Movement Coach, LMT. I have evolved from being in the corporate world as a Risk and Loss Control Consultant for 18 years. My career for the last 28 years started as a massage school teacher and licensed massage therapist, which evolved into being a medical massage therapist until my present-day focus as a Posture and Movement Coach. I have owned and operated my own business, Corporate Massage Therapies: Advanced Treatment Center LLC, for the past 22 years. I have well over 2500 hours of bodywork training and have served over 45,000 clients in my career.
What inspired you to start your business in posture wellness?
I always had a desire to develop massage therapy techniques to be of benefit to help people with posture alignment and musculoskeletal issues beyond the use of massage as a general therapeutic relaxation concept. Early in my career, I quickly developed an ability to help people solve many musculoskeletal issues beyond what traditional massage therapists, physical therapists, yoga, Pilates, and other movement professionals have been able to address and accomplish within their modalities.
What are the common misconceptions people have about posture and its impact on health?
I am challenging and changing the way movement professionals apply their crafts and modalities to deliver better and more long-lasting outcomes and results that laypeople experience and expect from other modalities. I am also changing the mindset of both practitioners and clients from being "fixed" as opposed to the concept I promote, that “self-care equals health care." In fact, I have written a book with that title and developed an in-house posture assessment app, which I call PosturePro, that serves as part of the basis for how I achieve these objectives. There is much more to what I do, which can be viewed at my website.
What unique approach does your business offer to help individuals improve their posture?
My approach to helping individual clients expands beyond my individual practice to also helping all other professionals in the movement industry adapt better techniques and approaches to how they coach and serve their individual clients. My future focus is now devoted to becoming an influencer, thought leader, and mindset changer within the professional movement and wellness communities, which include, but are not limited to, physical therapists, personal trainers, medical massage therapists, Pilates, yoga, stretching, and other mobility practitioners, and others within the movement therapy fields. I also serve as a mentor to professionals within the Pilates, yoga, massage, and other fields to help them develop more effective assessment skills to apply within their modalities, especially when conducting private sessions. This serves the dual purpose of helping professionals of other modalities apply their techniques better than can be accomplished in group class settings.
I have often found that practitioners and professionals of other modalities are severely lacking knowledge and skill sets to apply assessment and posture principles within their craft, and this motivated me to create a professional training app called PosturePro Training Institute, which offers updated knowledge of the current scientific concepts needed to understand how to properly assess human posture and alignment. See the enclosed link for examples of high multi-level classes offered both virtually and in-house here.
What specific challenges do clients face when trying to correct their posture, and how do you address them?
There are several key mindset changes and concepts that need explanation and agreement between me as a professional practitioner and the client. First, the average client needs education on why their posture is currently the way it is and that they, as a client, have to want to educate themselves in understanding this and take personal responsibility and an “active role” in their own posture correction and healing.
My business model has a built-in way of accomplishing this. The manner in which I collect data for assessment of posture simultaneously serves as a learning experience for clients as well as a practical coaching experience for clients as I gather the data. Sometimes this business model is not a good fit for everyone, and I am very honest upfront with my clients at the outset and tell them, “If you are coming to me to be ‘fixed,’ you are wasting my time and your money.” This can be quite shocking to clients, but I am honest about clarifying how I work and what expectations clients should receive from me as a professional.
In my 28 years of experience, I find that clients coming in and laying down to let someone else do something for and to them without the client’s active participation does not allow me, as a practitioner, to best practice my skill sets and does not meet the expectations of what the industry promotes to clients as the positive benefits and outcome expectations from their various modalities.
What type of results can clients expect after working with you on their posture?
First of all, because of my business model and the way I work, the client will experience changes in real time, with exact knowledge on how and why they are experiencing the changes and what steps they will have to take personal responsibility for in order to maintain the changes. Very often, the client will see dramatic reduction in pain levels, with very obvious changes in posture correction, which I can illustrate and reinforce to them that the posture changes witnessed in real time is why their pain levels have reduced.
Quite often my clients have reduced or have no pain levels before I put them on the table for bodywork. This gives me the advantage of having witnessed the assessment techniques literally showing me where the myofascial failures are and clients have been placed in a much better position before the bodywork begins to continue improving the myofascial dysfunctions without probing and prodding around the body looking for tight muscles and trigger points. The combination of the assessments, active client participation in assessment exercises, has literally identified where most of the problems lie. However, the professional needs to have the skill sets to know how to observe and assess, and apply findings with their modality. This is a major weakness and missing element within most movement professional modalities.
What steps do you take to personalize the posture wellness plan for each client?
I have developed a comprehensive system for gathering and assessing data about a person’s current posture and alignment, which is input into an app I developed called PosturePro. See this link for further details.
The data gathering process is as follows. During a client’s first appointment, I develop data by first interviewing them in great detail about the client’s current complaints, what their current goals are, the outcomes they expect from the session(s), and a very comprehensive medical history starting as far back as the client can remember and working forward. Often, other details will come up later in the session as they remember certain forgotten events. I then take photos of each side of the body as well as a short video of the client’s gait. After that, I take more written notes in more detail about static posture, standing, and sitting postures, and lead the client via a series of exercises and stretches to obtain assessment data about which parts of the body are out of alignment and not functioning, and failing. I am also educating and explaining to the client about what I’m finding, how they can begin to correct themselves via the exercises and stretches that I am teaching them, showing them how they are witnessing how their posture and/or pain levels are improving in real time. Then I perform bodywork to further correct misalignments found during the assessments.
Post-session, all of the recorded assessment data is loaded into my PosturePro app, which produces detailed reports on static posture, gait posture, treatment plans for each report, and an overall summary of findings report. These reports can be used by the client to refer to between sessions and/or be given to other healthcare professionals that they may be using to enhance the other healthcare provider’s understanding of the client and apply better service of their modalities. This also produces a potential means of evaluation and communication coordination between providers (which is seriously lacking in our modern healthcare system).
What advice do you have for individuals looking to improve their posture and overall well-being?
First, find a qualified professional movement coach or therapist who actually understands, has experience in assessments, and can show you evidence through testimonials or other means that what they do works.
Be willing to listen and prepared to change your attitudes, belief systems, mindsets, and behaviors about what is actually needed to change your posture in the long run. “The Bottom Line” is that it is ultimately the client’s responsibility to change their posture because we, as practitioners, are only the mechanics that can set them up in the right direction. The client, as the driver of their own vehicle (Body, Mind, Spirit), is going to have to do the work. As stated in one of the principles in my book Self Care = Health Care, it’s more important what clients do between sessions than it is what they do within sessions. Also, pain is a late-stage signal. By the time clients are hurting and receiving a pain signal (other than sudden accidents and impact events), the pain is just a dump site from a problem occurring elsewhere in the body, in addition to the site of pain.
The client has to have the desire to educate themselves about how the human body works, about what misalignments they have in their bodies that need correction (after all, you can’t get somewhere "improved posture" if you don’t know where you’re coming from "misaligned posture"). Self-education can get the client started in the right direction, but they will ultimately need an experienced professional to fully assess their posture so that they can begin the process of self-care and calibration of their postural alignment.
I strongly encourage all clients to get professional training in proper breath mechanics. It will be impossible to get the best possible posture without proper breathing mechanics as a natural state during all human transitional movements.
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