Laguna Hills Chiropractic l Importance of Good Posture for Overall Health
This is a GREAT interview with Dr. Tim Brown, a competitive athlete, on the role of posture on overall health!
By Erin Gulden, Editor
via myoptumhealth.com- Dr. Tim Brown on the Importance of Good Posture
Dr. Tim Brown has been a competitive athlete for most of his life. He played college football and qualified to play professional beach volleyball, and is an avid surfer and snowboarder. Since the 1980s, he has been helping his fellow athletes perform at their best. As medical director of the Association of Volleyball Professionals Tour, he pioneered Specific Proprioceptive Response Taping. Volleyballer Kerri Walsh sported his SPRT taping on her shoulder during the 2008 Summer Olympics gold-medal match, introducing the product to a wide audience. He has also worked as a doctor for Ballet Pacifica, Ironman World Triathlon championships, Race Across America and the Association of Surfing Professionals.
His line of Intelliskin posture clothing, which uses the same alignment technology as SPRT, is worn by athletes like pro surfer Kelly Slater and NBA star Derek Fisher, rocker Glenn Frey of the Eagles and Foundation core training method co-founder Eric Goodman. The list of elite and professional athletes is growing, representing sports from surfing and motocross, to baseball, football and golf.
We asked Brown about the role posture plays in a healthy lifestyle for everyone from athletes to office workers.
How important is it to have good posture?
Posture is part of people’s optimum health. You cannot maximize how you look, feel and function without good posture. We feel better about ourselves when standing tall and looking confident.
Other than back pain, what other problems can arise from bad posture?
Posture affects a host of structural and neuromuscular areas in the anatomy, from breathing to mood, digestion and blood pressure, let alone, how good you feel, move, perform and recover from illness or injury.
You work with athletes. Is good posture important for both athletes and office workers?
We are all athletes. We must train to improve and/or optimize how to function in life, just as we would in a sport. We must prepare and maintain our health if we are to do the best, most productive job we can do. Just like professional athletes, if we wish to maintain and thrive in our positions, we must maintain our health.
On average in the U.S. we sit 9.3 hours per day. There are studies that show that doctors can now predict mortality based upon how much we sit — It’s literally death by chair.
Have someone take a quick photo of you while in your typical working posture. If you are upright, aligned and in good posture, you are in a very select minority of the posture elite. However, I estimate this group is in the less than 5 percent of the working population. This means most of us need to pay serious attention to the shape and position of our posture “mold.”
By correcting our posture, can we reverse the damage done by years of slouching?
Yes. The good news is that we are self-healing organisms if we provide our bodies with the right environment and the proper stimulus. Every year, almost all the cells in every part of our bodies are replaced by new ones. Within this environment, what we eat, think and do will literally affect what we look like, feel like and function like. We truly have so much control of our health and the maintenance of our posture and alignment.
However, each of us must be committed to better understanding what we can do to upgrade where (and how well) we stand today. Life is movement and movement is life. We were not designed to be still. We were designed to move and so we function best when our lifestyles include plenty of it and in all directions.
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