Are Your Postural Habits Limiting Your Fitness?

When I work with clients it’s usually about increasing their fitness, strength and flexibility. However, to achieve these qualities we first have to recognise and release old postural habits. Long held beliefs about how your body should be shaped can inhibit your full potential. Do any of the following sound familiar?

Roll your shoulders back and down
Align your feet parallel
Tuck your pelvis under
Pull your abs in
Bend your knees
Lift your chest
Tuck in your chin
Squeeze your pelvic floor muscles
Straighten your spinal curves
Lengthen the back of your next like there’s a hook to the sky

Check in with your alignment right now…are you wearing any of these beliefs?

In my opinion, to move efficiently, with support and tone…none of these are needed.

We are often given these ‘exercise cues’ when working out in the gym or a Pilates, yoga or aerobics class. They also come into dance performance, riding competitions and indeed most sports. Sometimes they can serve a purpose and be entirely appropriate. However outside of that sporting or exercise environment the use of cues is questionable. Unnecessary cues reduce performance and can even lead to chronic tension.

Your body moves efficiently and with grace and ease without the need for external ideals. If you do adopt anything on the above list, you are going against your body’s natural rhythms and most likely tightening your muscles, restricting your breath and reducing your full range of movement. Definitely a cocktail for tension…

…and exercise should be about releasing not embedding tension

When we put on these exercise tips, it’s like putting on a heavy overcoat….and the more beliefs you wear the harder it is going to be to move.

My advice for daily movement is to let your body move freely without any holding cues.