Postural Assessments

“… it has been demonstrated in biomechanical studies (….) that the human being adapts its postural control strategies with respect to the perturbation.” 

— Cambridge English Corpus

Posture is about how your body reacts to movement, as we are never completely still, we are always moving and good posture is the body’s ability to move freely in and out of different positions.

We blame our aches and pains on bad posture, but it’s not just how you stand or sit that’s the problem, If you always carry a bag on your left shoulder, it’s likely that your left shoulder will become stiff and achy. If you have a habit of shifting your weight into one hip when standing, this hip will soon start to complain – we all have our own physical habits and behaviours and this influences how we move when we walk. The body is incredibly good at operating at 100% of whatever state it’s in and very often it’s not until we do something different like taking up running or joining the gym, that we become ‘injured’. We have just overloaded the system, the proverbial ‘straw’ on the camel’s back.

A postural assessment will look at how you stand and how you walk which will allow the body to reveal its secret habits. We can then look at ways in which you can correct these habits or patterns through specific exercises and movements. There are different approaches to this; we can target a particular injury or joint problem and work on Pilates exercises to safely bring more movement and flexibility to that area of the body or we can work on gait and look at how that particular issue fits into the bigger picture. From this, we can ‘teach’ the body new movement patterns. Ultimately, enabling better movement will mean less pain and discomfort and the body will function more efficiently – imagine how good that would feel!