Provocative Posture

Attaining a sculpted physique is not simply about losing fat, it’s definitely a huge component, but a properly designed program (not limited to fat loss) incorporates additional strategies to create what seem like unbelievable transformations, especially when compared relative to commercial programs.

One main variable that needs to addressed is posture.

Look at the wall photo that accompanies this article, they are all obviously the same person. However if you were to rank them in order of visual appearance in terms of who looks the most out of shape, I would assume that the ‘Kyphosis/ Lordosis’ versions would top the list. The next on the list would probably be forward head carriage. These 3 postural defects are actually the most common major distortions seen in the average person, and are usually evident as a combination of all three.

So by simply fixing postural imbalances we can ‘appear’ to be slimmer, without actually losing any fat. Appearance is a key word, as it’s the visual illusion that most people are most concerned by, embodied by the phrase ‘lookin’ good nekkid’. So a good fat loss program will not only focus on reduction of fat stores, but also how we present the body to best effect.

Every year people rush to the gym en-masse, either going it alone or hiring trainers to torture reluctant bodies back into youthful shape. To their amazement, this bully-begotten strength imposed on an impaired structure, only ails them more.

Unless you first analyse your structure, and design corrective measures as an integral part of every program, this new and hard fought for muscle will only increase defects and distortions, which will hasten, rather than reverse, degeneration.

Have a look around you, the evidence is obvious. The average person’s posture bears more of a resemblance to one of our Ape cousins than that of an upright Human. The skyrocketing incidences of postural defects in society arise from three main origins: domestication, cultural demands, and longevity.

We evolved in an extremely brutal environment, and our body still requires that level of exertion to function correctly. However, our current culture has developed an environment where it has almost eliminated any need for us to physically exert ourselves. This disconnect between our sedentary lifestyle and biological need for strenuous activity is a major cause for the degeneration of muscle, connective tissue and our skeleton.

Related to this cultural domestication is the demand’s it places upon us. Almost as soon as we are able to take our first wobbly steps as toddlers, those freed up hands are then put straight to work learning how to create scribbles on a parchment. This continues throughout our childhood, requiring young humans to be hunched over desks for a large proportion of their lives learning how to create and manipulate these squiggles to demonstrate their acquisition of intelligence. This carries forward into and throughout adulthood where we spend the majority of our days in the same position, putting to use these skills to demonstrate and apply our intelligence in an activity we call work.

Even outside of school and work, our leisure time is increasingly spent in this crouched seated posture as we in the UK currently spend on average 4 hours per day watching television. This figure doesn’t include the time spent using computers/ games consoles. All told the daily total that we spend in a huddled stoop is probably in the region of 14 hours, plus or minus a few hours. This habitual seated crouch shortens the hip flexors and hamstrings and overstretches the back muscles and connective tissue, all of which distorts the human spine.

One last bit of insult onto our structure is our increased longevity. In 1901 the expected lifespan of males was 45 years, and 49 for females, today we a soldiering on to 78 and 82 respectively. That increased span provides gravity a lot more time before our eventual demise to pull down the structure.

I can’t detail a full postural analysis here, as to be honest you could write a book on each joint (which there are), let alone the entire human body. However you can get a quick gross assessment of your posture by taking a side-on picture (like the attached photos). If you drop a vertical plumb line (you can do this easily on your photo-editing software) through the body, it should fall through the ear lobe, the midline of the shoulder, the midline of your Lumbar vertebrae (L3-5), just behind the hip, just in front of the knee and finally through the front of the ankle and the centre of the arch of your foot.

If you are excessively outside of these reference ranges (on average more than 1-2 inches), you may want to consider taking remedial action to correct the situation, as you’ll look and feel so much better having done so. With your head, trunk and pelvis in balanced vertical alignment, the body requires the least muscular activity, therefore the least energy, to hold itself upright, so by the end of the day you won’t feel knackered just simply from the fact of trying to maintain balance. Like a stack of dominos, if one is out of place you need put others out of place to compensate.

Posture, however, isn’t just limited to a visual arena, it can have very real and potent effects upon your biochemistry that can most definitely help fat loss (and other areas) via it’s influence on your hormones, neurology and psychology, although space limits us getting into that here, if there is call, I’ll write a further piece on that aspect.