Exercise rehabilitation and posture correction

The vast majority of non-pathological bad postures can be effectively corrected through scientific exercise rehabilitation intervention. You don’t even need to spend a lot of money on expensive personal training courses. You can also achieve obvious results by practicing at home according to the plan, but the premise is to find the root of the problem and don’t blindly follow the Internet celebrity tutorials.

Don't tell me, I met a little girl who works in Internet operations a while ago. She is 26 years old. She spends 12 hours or more in front of the computer every day. Her shoulders are hunched and her head is stretched forward.

In fact, there are currently two schools of thought in the sports rehabilitation circle regarding posture correction, and no one can convince the other. One group is the structure-first group, which believes that the root cause of poor posture is abnormal bone alignment, such as spinal facet joint disorders and sacroiliac joint dislocation. Without first loosening the compressed joints, no matter how hard you train your muscles, it will be in vain, and you will easily get strained. The other group is the function-first group, which believes that bone distortion is essentially caused by imbalanced muscle tension. Even if you temporarily break the bones back, the muscles will still be stretched in two days if they don’t change their force-generating habits. Relaxation and relaxation are all auxiliary, and muscle strength training is the core.

I would say that neither of them is right or wrong, it all depends on your situation. If you already have obvious limitations in movement, such as pain when you turn your head or pain when you bend down to pick up something, then don’t just practice swan neck or plank support. Go to the rehabilitation department of a regular hospital to take a X-ray first and let the doctor adjust the misaligned joints first, otherwise you will be doing everything wrong. If you just feel tired after sitting for a long time and stand for a long time without any obvious pain, then there is no need for bone correction. First loosen the tense muscles and train the weak muscles, and you will see the effect in two weeks.

Oh, by the way, I had a basketball coach come to me before. I have been doing high and low shoulders for almost ten years. I have been practicing low shoulder shrug training at home for more than half a year. The more I practice, the more distorted I am. My back hurts so much that it is difficult to even lift a barbell. During the final evaluation, it was discovered that he had sprained his left foot while playing basketball ten years ago and had not taken good care of it. Since then, he has been walking with a biased force, which has been compensated all the way from the ankle to the knee, pelvis, and spine, and finally manifested as high and low shoulders. We didn't touch his shoulders very much. We first adjusted the force-generating mode of his ankles for two weeks, and added some pelvic stabilization training. His shoulders were mostly flat on their own. I was dumbfounded at the time.

Don’t believe the nonsense on the Internet about “correcting XO-shaped legs in 7 days” and “building right-angled shoulders in 14 days”. Your posture is the result of three to five or even ten years of bad habits. How can you get it back in just ten days? If it really takes effect so quickly, you have to worry about whether it was forced on you, and you won’t even have time to cry if you hurt your joints. There are also those that make you stand against the wall for half an hour every day. Do you feel your back is sore after standing, and then shrink back after two hours when you are busy? That's because you rely entirely on external force to force yourself into a "looking" appearance, and your core and deep stabilizer muscles are not activated at all. Standing for half an hour is just a blind struggle. It is better to stand for 5 minutes at a time, stand with a sense of strength, and after standing, consciously maintain that sense of strength while walking and sitting. The effect is much better.

By the way, there is also a rather controversial saying, which says, "As long as it doesn't hurt, don't worry about your posture." There are many supporters and opponents of this view. Those who support it believe that as long as the body functions normally and rounded shoulders or uneven shoulders do not affect your life, there is no need to spend so much energy on it, but it will make you prone to anxiety. Opponents believe that poor posture is a precursor to chronic strain. It doesn’t hurt now just because it hasn’t reached the threshold. By the time it does hurt, it will already be irreversible strain. After having been exposed to so many cases, I feel that it all depends on personal needs: if you don’t have any discomfort and don’t worry about your appearance, then you can just stretch for two minutes after sitting for a long time. There is no need to do special corrective training. If you already have occasional shoulder and neck soreness or low back pain, or you just want to look good in clothes and feel more energetic, then make adjustments as soon as possible. If you really wait until the pain makes you unable to straighten your back before going to the hospital, you will spend a lot of money and suffer a lot.

To put it bluntly, the essence of posture correction through exercise rehabilitation is not to break you into a "standard figure" on some scale, nor is it to make you develop into a model-like right-angled shoulders and ant waist. To put it bluntly, it is to help you return your body to its original state - standing without strain, walking without soreness, wearing clothes that are crisp, and not causing shoulder and back pain every now and then. This is enough. Oh, and a final reminder, if you already have numbness or obvious tingling in your limbs, or if a scoliosis Cobb angle is found to be more than 20 degrees on a radiograph, don’t blindly follow online tutorials. See a rehabilitation doctor in a regular hospital for evaluation first. Listen to the professionals, and don’t mess around and create problems on your own.