Can a chiropractor help with your posture? Your posture is primarily a combination of three bodily systems: the nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems.
With very different functions, these three systems are known collectively as the musculoskeletal system.
They work together to hold you in positions like standing and enable complex movements such as walking and running.
Let’s look at them individually:
Skeletal System:
The bones of the skeleton are robust, rigid, and will always maintain their length by their nature.
Think of them like scaffolding that could be moved within an overall framework that provides your posture’s shape.
At the end of bones are muscles attached to other bones like sticky tape.
Muscular System:
Muscles are the opposite of bone, in the sense that instead of being rigid, they can contract, which means they can shorten in length.
When a muscle contracts, it is like a tug of war team pulling on a rope, which moves a bone.
When a bone is in motion, the “sticky tape” is pulled by a contracting muscle.
Nervous System:
The nervous system is known as the master system, as it is linked to every function within your body, controlling essentials to maintaining life, like your breathing whilst reading this.
The rhythm of your breathing is controlled by the nervous system, which coordinates muscles that pull on bone.
Think of your posture as a computer program that controls your balance, coordination, and movements.
Your posture consists of: a framework, a means that facilitates movement from this framework and a program that sends and receives messages into the facilitator for movement, balance, and coordination.
The better these three are aligned, the better your posture will be.
Good posture:
To understand what good posture is, we first must understand what that means.
At the Back Doctor, we assess baseline posture by three markers:
- 1) Are you symmetrical when you look in the mirror
- 2) Is your body corkscrewing in the same position
- 3) Is your ear, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle in alignment from the side?
The further away you are from these markers informs how we grade a person’s posture and begin to diagnose overall health and any posture problems.
The Back Doctor
In your first appointment with The Back Doctor, we take a baseline measurement and diagnose any poor posture by using photos from the front and side to explain your posture to you.
Often the problem with postural issues is that muscles lose coordination with the nervous system, and therefore bones lose their ideal geometric position of being upright and symmetrical.
The good news is your body wants to be upright and symmetrical, so with chiropractic adjustment treatment and remedial exercise, you can restore good posture very quickly.
Our chiropractic care treatment plans are designed for this purpose as we know that if you improve your posture, you will look and feel better and be less susceptible to injury in the future.
For more advice, feel free to contact us on 01444 453 888. We offer a free phone consultation if you would like to discuss this with one of our chiropractors at our clinic in Hayward’s Heath. Or book an appointment here.