Did You Know Good Posture Starts with Your Feet?

Like its cousin balance, posture is an often-overlooked, subtle aspect of later-life health. Not only is bad posture a body language giveaway for looking old, it is a combination of cause-and-effect for poor physical health, mental health, attitude, and energy. Fortunately, if you pay more attention to your posture, it can improve dramatically and lead to positive results in your health and your life.  An additional bonus is that, like balance, it can be practiced anywhere by just becoming more aware of it.

Try this experiment. Slump with your back hunched, a classic later-life, unhealthy posture, and try to take a deep breath. You can’t, especially to the top of your lungs. Less air and oxygen mean less energy with every breath you take. And that’s just the beginning. Think about how cramped and shrunk all your vital organs are in that posture. Every breath you take not only feeds your blood, it moves and massages all those organs. Poor breathing, which starts with poor posture, means less blood flow to your heart as well as to the workhorses of your immune system: your liver, kidneys, and all the other unsung health heroes inside of you that do their tireless work under the radar. Acknowledging them by giving them more room and more circulation is a big step toward better health.

What happens to your neck in this slumped posture? It has no choice but to strain to look up, putting extra pressure on the back and sides of the neck where the carotid arteries are that supply blood to your brain. The strain on the lower back and neck muscles in this position is enormous. With a straight back and strong legs your neck sits effortlessly on top of a strong foundation and stays long and spacious.

Still slouching, look down at your stomach. What do you see? When I slouch I have a pot belly, which disappears when I stand up straight.

Posture is Dynamic, Not Static

Good posture takes effort and training. It requires learning how to stand from the ground up and practicing enough to make it second nature to stand that way. A great source for this kind of practice and attention is yoga. The “simplest” yoga pose is tadasana (literally, mountain pose). This pose is deceptive because you just stand with your hands at your sides. Anyone who has ever practiced this with a teacher knows it is far more complicated and strenuous than it looks.

The illustrated guide, Yoga: The Iyengar Way by Silva, Mira, and Shyam Mehta, shows a wonderful example of tadasana in the first pages of the book. It starts with paying attention to what the feet are doing, then the legs, lower trunk, upper trunk, arms, neck, and head. In all, two whole pages of detailed description accompany photos of the pose.

The authors explain that you need to pay attention to each area of the body, so the area directly above is well supported from below. (Think about the bottom rock layers of a mountain supporting the upper layers.) It is a dynamic posture that needs lots of attention to practice and master. I know from experience that it can be daunting trying to get it all right, all at once. It worked for me to focus on one aspect at a time, starting with my feet, and then see what the effect felt like on the parts above as I aligned from the ground up.

For instance, we usually stand with the front of our thighs relaxed and sagging. Without moving, try to engage those muscles and pull them up. Once I do, it automatically engages my pelvis and causes my solar plexus to rise, relaxing my back into a more spacious and upright position. Bonus: This flattens my stomach!

A yoga instructor friend told me she had a bodybuilder sweating from the tadasana pose in a few minutes. He said it was harder to manage and sustain than lifting a heavy weight. That’s because his body was inflexible, and he was not used to practicing in this dynamic yet subtle way.

“Dynamic yet subtle” is a key phrase for this posture and alignment pose, and the subtlety is where the art of body awareness lies. The muscles that need to work are flexed, and the ones that don’t are relaxed. Once I become aware of this energy, good posture starts to flow more naturally. With practice and patience, it begins to feel more comfortable, for instance, to sit up straight in a chair rather than collapsing on the sofa.

The benefits of healthy posture range from increased body awareness to better circulation, to better breathing, to more energy, to just looking younger. And whether you use the book I mention above (which presents 100 or so other poses in the same detail), or take a class, or find a teacher, or find your own source for a healthy posture practice, working on your posture will yield benefits that you probably weren’t aware of.