Postural Therapies: What Do They Consist Of?
Many times, you harm your body without even knowing it. Whether it’s by sitting on the couch or in a chair or while playing sports, you often force your body into harmful postures. Postural therapies can help you change this.
Unless you do something about it, various pathologies can arise from bad postures. In fact, the more time passes, the worse they’ll be. This is why it’s important to find a way to limit the damage.
Postural therapies are a way to make your body work correctly. They allow you to stretch parts of your body that have been shortened or reintroduce a structure to its natural place.
A very clear example is the shoulders. It’s common for people to have rounded shoulders, which leads to a series of muscular imbalances and, in the long run, bone problems. Well, with postural therapy, they’re pulled back and down, to a more natural position.
How the body’s muscular system works
To understand the importance of these therapies, the first thing you have to fully understand is that the body works holistically. Muscle chains are interconnected. Thus, maintaining an incorrect posture in one part of the body will end up affecting the other.
When you pick up a glass, your back contracts to maintain balance. When you run, your abdominal wall and paravertebral muscles hold your back in place. Finally, when you punch something or someone, it contracts to the tibialis anterior muscle, which is located in front of the leg, to add strength and balance to the blow.
All these are examples of how a muscle that isn’t inherently related to a certain movement can be affected by it. What postural therapies do is work muscle chains instead of specific muscles. Thus, they stretch entire chains, which helps the surrounding structures return to more natural positions.
What are postural therapies?
Postural therapies aren’t based on doing exercises. Yes, you can work your posture and back muscles with classic exercises.
However, postural therapies represent global postural reeducation (GPR), meaning that they focus more on placing the body in the correct posture and maintaining it for long periods of time.
Thus, in an hour, you may only do two or three different postures. At the beginning of the session, you’ll choose what you want to accomplish and the parts of your body that you want to stretch. Based on this, you’ll adopt some postures or others.
An example would be if your back is arched and your shoulders are rounded from working in front of the computer. In this case, you’ll adopt a posture in which you’ll:
- Stretch your arms to open your rib cage and stretch your pectorals and arm muscles.
- Pull your shoulders down and back.
- Practice a supine position, face-up, to keep your back straight.
- Align your torso so that your back is straight for the duration of the exercise.
- Perform cervical traction to improve your neck posture.
- Breathe in, feeling how the air inflates your rib cage.
All this without taking your legs into account! When you suffer from lower back pain, for example, you’ll place your legs in a position that stretches the hamstring muscles. This way, you relieve the traction these muscles exert on your lumbar spine.
A holistic aid
Postural therapies are positive in many ways, including those we described here. In addition to how they benefit the muscular and skeletal system, they’re also great for proprioception, or balance, and fascia.
Regarding proprioception, when you place your body in the proper posture during those 20 minutes, the goal is for you to focus on how all the structures are positioned. In other words, you need to internalize what the correct postures are to be able to later identify if you’re in a bad posture.
Meanwhile, regarding the fascia, for many years, myofascial release therapy has been working on this tissue that covers the entire interior of your body. To do this, you need to maintain some postures over time and a gentle approach is required. And this is exactly what positional therapies provide!
Therefore, postural therapies are really helpful in several ways. Nevertheless, they should always be done under the supervision of an expert, since their success depends on maintaining postures for long periods of time and your body will tend to return to its natural posture almost without you even realizing it.
Thus, it’s important for someone to control the activity. If you do them correctly, they’re a great way to prevent widespread pain and many pathologies.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- M. Pita. Cifosis torácica tratada con reeducación postural global. Archivos de Ciencias de la Salud de UNIPAR. Vol. 4, Núm. 2, 2000.
- E. Corrêa, F. Bérzin. Efficacy of physical therapy on cervical muscle activity and on body posture in school-age mouth breathing children. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology. Vol. 71, Issue 10, Pages 1527-1535. 2007
- P. Pillastrini, F. de Lima, F. Banchelli, et al. Effectiveness of Global Postural Re-education in Patients With Chronic Nonspecific Neck Pain: Randomized Controlled Trial, Physical Therapy, Volume 96, Issue 9, Pages 1408–1416, 2016