5 Reasons Why You Need to Correct Your Posture

Maintaining good posture on a daily basis impacts your everyday life more than you know.  Practicing good posture habits promote a healthy lifestyle and help with your balance, range of motion, increase blood circulation, stengthens your spine and can stop or prevent back pain from occuring.  Are you surprised that having good posture has so many positive impacts?  The following are reasons why good posture is so important.

Posture Impacts Everyday Life

Good Balance

You have probably heard that having good posture promotes good balance, but do you know why?

You are Less Likely to get Inured

When you maintain good posture habits, you are more likely to have better balance.  When your balance is on point, you are actually preventing your body from injury.  Let’s say you work out on a daily basis and practice yoga first thing in the morning.  Balance is key to executing the proper yoga stances, and if you are wobbly, you may fall and injure yourself or pull a muscle out.  When you have good posture, your balance is also on point and you can practice better form in whatever exercise you are performing.

Good Posture Promotes Good Balance and Disburses Your Body Weight

Another benefit of having good balance from your posture, is that your body weight is carried evenly throughout your midsection

and lower spine.  If you are hunched over, your center of mass shifts and you are more likely to lose your balance.  When this happens, your body weight shifts immediately and could cause you to fall over.  When your back is naturally curved, your body will have good balance, and certain parts of your body will not be overworked for handling extra mass.  Having good balance centers your body weight evenly above your feet.

Good Balance Helps You Move Better

Another plus of having good posture and thus good balance is that you are able to execute almost any movement with ease.  Let’s say you are a runner and participate in 5k’s and half marathons frequently.  If your balance was off, you could quite possibly misstep and tumble over.  The same goes if you are a dancer or basketball player -having good balance from good posture allows you to do any movement more efficiently or easily.  Balance is key because you can excel at your sport.

Range of Motion

Maintaining good posture not only gives you better balance, but also allows you to have a larger range of motion compared to someone without good posture.  If you are hunched over, or have an overextended curve in your spine, your back will adjust itself in order to make up from the nonalignment.  When this happens, your range of motion can be impacted.  Say for example you sit at a computer desk all day and find yourself looking down at your keyboard or paperwork in front of you.  If you do not practice good posture over time, your neck will naturally adopt that downward looking position as your new normal stance.  Then let’s say you need to reach behind you to grab something from your printer, and your reach may not be as long as it used to.  This is due to your neck and spine taking on a new “normal” position and your back muscles cannot support the long reach that you used to make when you had good posture.  This is exactly why maining good posture is key to having a healthy and normal range of motion.

If you constantly slouch and have been doing so for years, your pelvic area and hips can also be effected by poor posture.  Many Americans experience lower back pain for many reasons, but whenever this occurs, you may notice that you are limited to performing wide open leg stretches or hip movements due to the lower back pain.  Your hips and legs are impacted because your lower back is bearing the weight of your body from your unaligned spine and limits your mobility in your lower body.

Improves Circulation

Having good posture, believe it or not, promotes circulation in your body.  When your spine is aligned, your respiratory system and circulatory systems are activated and perform at their best.  Good posture promotes good airflow in your body which directly impacts good circulation.  When your spine is naturally aligned, your circulatory system reacts property in the body

and your nerves function as they should.  If you tend to slouch over time, this can cause a pinched nerve and negatively impact your circulation.  When this happens, you can experience a momentary tingling in areas such as your feet or legs.  Some people refer to this as a body part “falling asleep”.  If you align your spine and practice good posture, I bet that the tingling sensation would disappear.  You most likely pinched a nerve and stopped the flow of blood in one of your limbs momentarily.  When you practice good posture, your blood circulation should be on point, and you will experience less body parts falling asleep.

Strong, Healthy Spine

Your spine is the literally the backbone of your body and it stays strong and healthy when you practice good posture.  As you have already read above, if you have poor posture, you could experience poor circulation, limit your range of motion, be off balance, or even get injured.  All of these reasons would negatively impact your spine overtime, when really you should be strengthening it each day with exercise and healthy posture habits.  Practicing good posture will keep your spine aligned and keep your back healthy in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Prevent or Stop Back Pain

Many of us experience some sort of back pain, whether it’s everyday pain, or we pull a back muscle after lifting something heavy or straining it.  If you remember to practice healthy posture habits, you can incorporate a healthy spine into every move you make.  For example, if you need to lift something heavy into your trunk, remember to keep good posture and lift with your legs instead of your lower back.

If you find yourself sitting at a desk all day and slouching, try sitting up with a posture brace for several hours in order to train your back to resume it’s natural curve.  Incorporating these techniques into your daily habits can prevent or even stop your back pain.  When you have good posture, you can reduce fatigue in your muscles and even reduce muscle strain from improper lifting techniques or movements.  Having good posture also decreases wear and tear on your spine and instead strenthens it.

To sum it all up, having good posture positively impacts your body in many ways.  Sitting up straight and catching yourself when you start to hunch over can have lifelong effects on your back and spine.  Keep it aligned and practice good posture as often as possible.