Posture Awareness Is Your New Vital Sign
- Brainz Magazine
- Jul 28
- 9 min read
Luther has over 27 years of experience in Educating and treating the public, elite athletes, & pain management clients for chronic musculoskeletal and soft tissue alignment and postural issues.
Poor posture isn’t just about slouching; it’s quietly draining your energy, stressing your joints, and shortening your lifespan. Discover how improving your alignment can unlock better health, reduce pain, and boost your longevity.
The hidden power of posture
Modern life has us hunched over screens, slouched in chairs, and frozen in static positions. But posture isn’t just about aesthetics; it plays a pivotal role in your physiology and longevity.
According to National Geographic, poor posture can impair breathing, digestion, muscle function, coordination, and cognition, and may even accelerate chronic pain and nerve compression.
Why does it matter
Developing self-awareness of posture and alignment is one of the best healthcare preventative activities a person can use to improve and maintain health and wellness for mind, body, and spirit. Except for sudden traumas, accidents, disease processes, etc, a lot of muscle and soft tissue postural issues that people seek remedies from healthcare professionals can be identified early and are related to poor posture and movement habits.
The current utilization of Clinical Preventive Services (CPSP) is steadily declining each year, which indicates people are not using enough self-care practices. According to the OASH (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion), Healthy People data show a clear decline in the use of CPS. In 2015, only 8.5 percent of adults aged 35 years and older received all recommended high-priority CPS, and that number fell to 5.3 percent in 2020. Additionally, in the 2016–2017 survey period, 78.7 percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 years had 1 or more preventive health care visits in the previous 12 months, but that number dropped to 69.6 percent in the 2020–2021 survey period.
My personal opinion is I feel that education, training, and coaching in postural awareness should begin in early childhood so skills sets can be learned and postural issues can be identified and addressed earlier before major muscle and soft tissues and other medical conditions become a major performance or health issue.
I tell my clients the following: “Most people walk around life like blobs of flesh with no idea of how they are made and/or function “. Then, when something goes wrong, we go to healthcare professionals who often “spot treat” the symptoms and not the source of the problem. This will be the subject of a future article/blog about how many of the western movement healthcare professionals often do not go far enough in whole body evaluation and assessment before addressing any particular body concerns.
There is scientific evidence that posture has a significant impact on health. Did you know that decreased walking speed may be an indicator of overall health and a strong predictor of early mortality (Studenski et al., 2011)? Also, 28% of adults over 50 years of age suffer from movement disorders, and approximately 40% of patients with neurological gait disorders experience one or frequent falls, possibly causing serious injuries or death.
A landmark study by Araujo et al. (2022) published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that individuals who were unable to complete the One Leg Stance test for more than 10 seconds had an 84% higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to those who could successfully perform the test! Source: American Posture Institute. These are just some of the abundant evidence that posture self-awareness is something to pay attention to for health and wellness.
In the next section, I will describe a process where a person can begin learn to self-awareness of how humans are structured to move and how to recognize when posture and alignment are beginning to deteriorate. Hopefully, this will encourage you to engage in more Clinical Prevention Activities as part of your self-awareness healthcare program and seek out those professionals who can assist you in this process.
You may be wondering, “But I do self-care activities like Yoga, Pilates, Personal Training, running, walking, and other sports activities, etc”. There is nothing wrong with these and similar activities or their instructors, but there is a critical missing element; very few people, as the users of the programs, know about their posture and how their body operates. The point I am making is that it’s not just the activity that will make the self-care improvements, but the application of the activities to your postural needs.
Let me introduce you to a formula I developed for understanding human health and wellness with the following equation:
Fitness formula
Alignment + Stability + Flexibility (full joint range of motion) + cardio fitness + strength training = Health -Wellness- Fitness
Most people utilizing health and fitness activities, routines, and philosophies engage in one or maybe two, but not all, of the activities on the left side of the health fitness equation. The part that most people (including most movement professionals) are unaware of is the first and most important part of the equation on the left side of the equal sign, “Alignment“, and the second most underutilized fitness activity is flexibility training.
There are two main points I want to emphasize from the above statements: one is that you, as a practitioner, should thoroughly understand your alignment and posture before engaging in fitness activities. The second point is that your professional movement coach or trainer needs to thoroughly evaluate your alignment and posture before applying their techniques. If they are not doing this, then you are not getting the full benefits of the activity and expertise of the instructor. Again, the activity does not fully address the alignment issues, but the application of the technique toward posture alignment goals should be the focus.
Self-postural awareness
There are many models of assessment to evaluate posture. There are even now app technologies to measure posture more scientifically. However, I am going to introduce to you a non-technical way for lay people to assess themselves and begin to recognize how your form can affect your function, creating optimal performance or dysfunction depending on your body alignment.
In my practice, I coach each client on their posture on this process and show them techniques on managing their identified posture dysfunctions, and how to calibrate the deviations of posture toward better balance. I begin by emphasizing that posture should be understood on multiple levels:
You should know what your posture deviations are currently, how the body learns the patterns you teach it, and how the brain normalizes these movement and postural patterns and will hold them until changed (muscle memory). This means you must mentally understand what patterns your body tends to hold.
You should be able to identify internally what this posture form “feels like” (proprioceptive awareness). Most people have little sense of their proprioceptive environment (internal sense of self and relation of body parts to each other).
You should be able to look at your form and feel what you mentally know about your posture form in the major positions your body will perform while “standing, sitting, side lying and laying supine”.
When you learn to know your body in this fashion, you will be able to identify issues early that create performance, movement, and pain problems.
How to view your posture: An introduction
I coach my clients in two ways to begin the journey of learning about their posture. One is in what’s called static mode, i.e., while standing, sitting, or lying on the back or sides. The posture patterns you hold standing most often follow your transitions in movement from standing to sitting to lying down. It’s important to be able to feel the shift between positions so that you can monitor and calibrate your posture as you transition.
The other posture pattern one should learn to feel is while moving. Observation of movement patterns is the best way for me to determine what myofascial muscle soft tissue lines and patterns are not in balance. Once the movement dysfunctional patterns are identified, clients can be educated on what these patterns are, how to recognize and correct them. Once the client learns and understands their movement patterns, this is a skill that can be used for life in early identification of muscle and soft tissue movement issues (Self-Awareness Prevention).
The body zones
I coach clients on how to understand their bodies by breaking them down into sections as follows:
Zone 1: From the top of the hips to the bottom of the feet.
Zone 2: Top of hips to the bottom of the rib cage.
Zone 3: From the Bottom of the ribs to the midline of the chest (nipple line). Zone 3B Nipple line to top of shoulders at the corners, Zone 4 Neck and Head
Each of the zones is evaluated by imagining a plumb line down the center of your body dividing the body into left and right halves; down the sides into front and back sections, and across the waist line (top of hips) into top and bottom sections.
Body zone template
Stand in front of a mirror and begin to observe these zones in yourself. Compare the left and right sides of the body to notice if any zone is higher or lower, more forward or backward, or rolled in or out than the other side. For example, a common pattern that I see for Zone 1 is that the right hip is higher than the left, the right hip rotates toward the left (as looked at from the front of the body), and the tops of the hips tend to tilt forward (toward the feet, called anterior pelvic rotation). This particular pattern creates a functional short left leg effect. One major dysfunctional effect of this posture arrangement is uneven walking because one leg cycles in flexion and extension differently from the other. This often looks like a “peg leg or waddle side to side” look to walking.
When sitting, one hip (in this case example, the left) will drop lower into your sitting surface. Also, the seated postural distortions can put pressure on your air and food tubes (respiratory and digestive systems), creating symptoms for which people often seek medical treatment. There are other effects to side-lying or laying on your back, also from this posture arrangement.
What I coach clients is that this or any type of significant distortion in Zone 1 will cause dysfunction in all of the zones above it. These distortions will also follow you from your transitions from standing to sitting, or lying down, and it is critical that clients understand this on a mental level and be able to feel and see the misalignments. In my practice, I coach clients on the position of all 4 of their body zones and how to apply corrective practices to manage the postural dysfunctions.
In the above chart, the horizontal lines from the waist to the knees represent a section of Body Zone 1 highly affected by modern-day sitting habits. Modern humans sit too much, placing a severe distortion on overall postural balance, weakening the entire human postural framework.
Conclusions
In order to achieve good posture, one should thoroughly understand the distortions of all of their body zones in order to have effective means of identifying deviations of posture in all of their transitions of movement that may lead to misalignment, stability, movement problems, muscle and/tissue dysfunctions, and pain. Also, if you are participating in movement, exercise, and sports activities either solo or with a coach, everyone involved should be working with your individual postural needs to take full advantage of the benefits of the activities and to avoid injury.
Adopt the following philosophy well: it is not the talent of you or your movement skill coach, or not just the type and/or structure of the movement activity conducted, but it is the application of the skill set of yourself or your coach to your individual specific postural needs. I can’t emphasize this enough; if you don’t know your posture distortions and/or have a movement coach that is not helping you identity and correct your posture according to your particular structure, then you need to start a self discovery process because as the title of the article implies, “Posture is the New Vital Sign”. Ignoring these signs can lead to movement, illness, and disability that can be prevented.
If you are in the local area of my practice, you can begin the process of discovering how to improve your overall health. If not, screening services for identifying and improving your posture are available by Zoom, and/you can give them to your movement coach to make more effective use of their services. If interested, the contact information is below:
Corporate Massage
Therapies-Advanced Treatment Center
5000 Sagemore Drive, Suite 200
Marlton, NJ 08053
609-257-8595
Read more from Luther Lockard
Luther Lockard, Posture & Movement Coach, LMT
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.
