Shoulders Back!

Why is posture important? Should you really care if you have good posture? And if so, how do you go about fixing your posture? I would argue that posture is incredibly important and not just because I’m a chiropractor and that’s part of my job. It turns out that good posture has many physical health benefits as well as mental and social benefits. 

Let’s start with the physical benefits. When it comes to spinal health, a well-stacked spine with good healthy curves can help decrease degeneration and reduce your chances of bulging a spinal disc. Think of each spinal disc like a jelly doughnut. When we have good posture, the jelly stays inside the doughnut. When we have poor posture and are very forward bent, it’s like you are sandwiching one side of the jelly doughnut and pop! The jelly comes out the back! Secondly, when you have good posture you also have better lung capacity. If your shoulders are rolled forward and slouched, you put downward pressure on your lungs and reduce the amount of space they have to work with. A decreased lung capacity can mean faster breathing and a higher resting heartbeat, neither of which is healthy. When you have poor posture your organs will also not function as well. Your abdominal space is decreased when you slouch. This decreased space puts increased pressure on all of your abdominal organs and restricts blood flow. Again, this compression is bad for your health and can cause issues, especially with digestion. The last point I will make on the negative effects physically is on our overall energy levels. When we are standing or sitting in bad posture, we overuse a lot of muscles. While it may seem like more work to keep good posture, when your head and shoulders are sitting too far forward, your trapezius muscles and neck muscles get over-worked and can cause headaches and a decrease in energy levels.

While those physical reasons should probably be good enough reason to maintain good posture, what about the mental and social side? Well, it turns out that good posture has been linked to good overall mental health and maturity. When we are first born we have very poor posture and no spinal curves to speak of. As a baby’s brain develops so does its posture. Good posture is essential for walking, that C-shaped spine we are born with is not ideal for when we want to start doing life in an upright manner. Most toddlers learn good posture fairly quickly as it is natural and ingrained in our DNA. Good posture with the shoulders pulled back has been shown to represent good brain health because the cerebellum (the part of the brain that controls posture) is firing on all cylinders. This is actually very observable and why as a person’s mental health declines, especially with diseases such as dementia, their posture will also decline. On a social scale, good posture has been shown (in more studies than I can list) to improve other people’s opinion of you and they will have a natural inclination to assume you are a more competent person and someone worth taking note of. This is not a feature that is limited to humans either, most mammals will display this mannerism. Simply think of your dog’s behaviour when it’s been bad and knows it. A dog will take on a forward slouch and keep its head low to the ground as a sign of submission.

There are many more reasons why good posture is important, but I want to make sure you have a good starting point towards better posture. The first step towards better posture is being more active in pulling our shoulders back and making sure we aren’t slouching in front of the computer, good ergonomics will play a big role here. A second way is to make sure that our spines are highly mobile. Chiropractic care, stretching and yoga will help here. Lastly, we need to strengthen some under-utilized muscles. Obviously, everyone is different and theirs no one size fits all. But the vast majority of us would benefit from a daily regimen that includes these few exercises. For the upper spine and neck, I like to see a daily routine including the YWTL exercise and stretching of the pectoral (chest) muscles, this will help to pull the shoulders and head back naturally. For the lower back, stretching the iliopsoas muscles (hip flexors) and strengthening the core with abdominal planks will go a long way in improving your posture. If you are unsure of how to do these exercises or stretches, there are a huge number of videos on Youtube that will provide better instruction than I ever could in writing. At the end of the day, your posture actually has a huge effect on your overall health and is often overlooked. 4-5 minutes a day devoted to good postural exercises can make a work of difference.

Are You Cleared for Takeoff?

Let’s talk about pain today. We have all experienced it from time to time and to varying extents. Whether you just stubbed your toe, touched a hot stove, or rolled your ankle. One of the first things you will feel is pain. Why? Well, it's our warning system. Pain tells us that we are damaging our bodies. It might be saying “hey, stop touching that stove it’s burning your hand!” or “hey, you can’t walk on that ankle until I have a chance to fix the torn tissues”. We understand that pain very well, it’s for our protection and we could get severely injured without it. However, there is another type of pain that is less straightforward. That pain is chronic pain.

To start looking at pain we need to understand a little bit about how pain works in the first place. The best way is with an analogy. Imagine your brain as a flight control tower. Like a flight control tower, your brain has control of and is constantly communicating with everything around it. The control tower will tell pilots when to take off and when they are cleared to land. Just as importantly the pilots will communicate with the control tower to let them know if there is a problem. Let’s suppose one of the plane engines is not working right and the plane is not safe to take off. The pilot does their final check before takeoff and sees there is a problem with the engine. The pilot will call up to the tower and let them know that the plane is not safe to takeoff. After receiving the call, the tower will cancel the takeoff and direct the plane back to a hanger. This is great! A damaged plane has not taken off and there was no harm caused. However, I want you to now imagine that there is a bit of a troublesome plane. This plane has an engine failure every time it tries to take off. Every day the plain is scheduled to fly, but right before the plane takes off, the tower receives its call from the pilot and the pilot once again tells the tower that the plain is not safe to fly. Now the tower controllers are very efficient at their job. After weeks of the pilot calling the tower and telling them that there is an engine problem before every takeoff, the tower controllers stop picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. As soon as they see the call come in from the pilot they simply cancel the takeoff and send the plane back to the hangar. However, a few weeks after the tower stopped listening to the pilot, the engine problem was finally fixed! However, there is now a new problem. Now every time the pilot calls the tower to let them know that all systems are go, the control tower simply cancels the takeoff without ever picking up the phone to hear what the pilot has to say. The plane remains grounded despite the fact that there is no longer anything wrong with the plain. The problem is no longer a mechanical issue with the plain, it’s now a communication problem. In order to straighten the issue out, proper communication must be restored.

Ok, so what does this rather long analogy have to do with chronic pain? Well, believe it or not, this is very similar to what happens when a person develops chronic pain. If an issue lingers for too long, the brain will stop consulting with the tissue and just assume the tissue is still damaged. Recent studies have shown that most chronic pain is actually not related to damaged tissue and is in fact a brain communication problem. So what can be done? The brain must learn to pick up the phone again and talk with the tissue. When a new signal is sent from the tissue, the brain will pick up on that new signal because it’s not the one it usually receives from the tissue. One of the most powerful signals is that of motion. When motion is put through a tissue there is a signal sent to the brain. It's like the mechanic calling the control tower instead of the pilot to say that the plane is good to fly. After multiple calls from the mechanic saying everything is fine, the tower will eventually start picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. When the body receives enough motion signals saying that there is nothing wrong with the tissue, the brain will start to communicate properly again. This is how a chiropractic adjustment helps those in chronic pain! The adjustment sends a huge motion signal to the brain, after receiving multiple of these motion signals from an adjustment, the brain starts to listen and to communicate properly again.

Its All in The Hips

Modern life presents itself with a multitude of new stressors. In past columns I talked about dealing with our fight or flight response, poor diet and missing essential nutrients. For this column I wanted to focus on something a little more mechanical, and there are few muscles in the human body that cause as many problems as the hip flexors.

Before we can jump into the problems that the hip flexors cause we should know more about them. First off, the hip flexors are actually a complex of 3 muscles known as the psoas major, psoas minor, and the iliacus, or the iliopsoas when referring to all three. These three muscles are anchored to several parts of the low back and pelvis before attaching to the thigh bone. The main thing these muscles do is lift your thighs as you walk and stabilize the spine when you sit. The iliopsoas muscles are some of the largest in the body and have plenty of important things running around and even through them. 

Now there are many different things that can start to cause issues with the iliopsoas muscles, but I will stick to the most common ones. The first, and probably the most common cause of iliopsoas dysfunction is lack of activity and sitting. When we sit, the muscles are in a shortened state and after a long period of time the muscles tighten. When we finally stand up, the muscles remain tight and cause dysfunction. A second cause is frequent exercise without proper stretching, runners run into iliopsoas problems because of the nature of running. When a person runs, the legs go through the same motion over and over again often thousands of times a day. If the runner doesn’t properly stretch out after the run, the iliopsoas will tighten into the rather limited range used to run. The third and perhaps less looked at cause is stress, yes going back to that fight or flight response. If we are stressed, our bodies go into fight or flight and this tightens our iliopsoas muscles up in preparation for running from that bear, or in a more modern circumstance, meeting with our new boss.

When there is dysfunction in the iliopsoas muscles, various symptoms will arise. The tightening of the muscle will actually cause  a rotation of the pelvis forward, this leads to low back pain and changes in the natural spinal curvature right through the neck. Tight iliopsoas muscles also affect the surrounding nerves, this can lead to pain going into various parts of the legs, buttocks and groin area. The last and most controversial is the effect on the digestive system. Our intestines are extremely dense in nerve endings and a vast number of those nerves pass directly by the iliopsoas muscles, it is theorized that when these muscles are tight and irritated it will lead to digestive dysfunction.

So what do you do about tight iliopsoas muscles? Several things actually. The first is to stretch, stretch, stretch! Whether you spend your day sitting at a desk, or running marathons, stretching will help to calm the muscles and prevent rotation of the pelvis. The second thing is to strengthen the opposing muscles, these muscles consist of the gluteus muscles and the abdominal muscles. When the muscle strength is properly balanced the iliopsoas muscles will be forced to stay in a more lengthened state. The last thing is to bring your body out of that stressful state. Whether it be through meditation, mindful breathing or yoga, when you relax your mind, your body will follow suit.