Our body has a perfectly designed bone and muscle system. Their target is to protect our vitals and allow us to function on our daily routine. What we immediately understand due to bad body posture is pain.

Pain is caused by

• Muscles injury due to constant contraction over the limit that they are designed to work to.
  Whenever we hear muscle injury, our mind goes to something severe like strain, tear, swelling… In reality injury means something simpler. For example just for a slit had turn 7 muscles are energized. They are designed to turn our head, allow us to see what we need, and then bring the head straight up again. If we turn our head and keep it there for several hours (to look towards the computer monitor) some of these muscles will be “overheated”. This is injuries’ first stage.
• Nerves pressure, when some hernia shows up in an intervertebral disc.

Unfortunately pain is not the worst evil caused by bad body posture…

Tighten one wrist with your other hand and observe what happens. The area blazes. Of course! You stopped the blood circulation! Imagine this happening to your stomach, your intestines or even your heart for several hours! Bad breathing, bad digestion lead to severe illnesses of all types!

What are the reasons causing bad body posture?

It’s very simple: our profession and our habits… Whatever it is that we’re doing for many hours affects our musculoskeletal system. The way we sit in front of the computer, lie in front of the TV, chat on our telephone etc., if it’s prolonged, continuous pressure is forced to certain body parts, causing accordingly malfunctions.

What can we do?

• Be aware of your body posture during the day. Observation is the first golden key before any change can occur.
• Eliminate the reasons that redound to bad body posture. If we work many hours in an office adjust the chair correctly. If you text a lot adjust your phone to your eyes level (not vice versa)
• Strengthen the muscles that keep your spine straight up! The deep core. They are muscles programmed to work all day long with a small amount of tension. The good news is that they strengthen easily! Every time you catch yourself hunching, pool your belly button in and imagine the top of your head being pooled by a rope towards the sky. Only the thought is enough to energize and strengthening our deep trunk muscles.
• Change activity regularly activating other muscles groups and allowing the overworked muscles to rest.
• If the above is not possible than it is necessary to take frequently brakes during which we make the opposite movement than the one that our body had stretching the muscles that work overtime.Exercise! Practice regularly a couple easy exercises that will strengthen even more your back and abdomen muscles. The ones that are hidden deep in your corpus!

Don’t overlook the small infestation that your body feels while doing some activity.  If you don’t respect the messages of discomfort that your body is sending, they will evolve to serious health problems that will take much more time and effort to fix!

Katerina Patmazoglou
Yoga Instructor

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