Anyone who is standing up is, by definition, balanced, but how well are they balanced is a different question. Poorly balanced posture requires more energy to stay upright, causing fatigue and stressing joints, which over time wear out more quickly than nature intended.
Aging Well really is a “balancing act.”
Posture is the practical end result of how you balance your body. Postural balance is the ability to control your body’s position in space, and keep your body upright and stable, especially when challenged. Posture is dynamic, not static, and is a trade off between flexibility and stability, between motion and effort.
There is no one “perfect” posture.
Posture is about more than standing straight, and improving posture involves more than just telling someone to stand straight and keep their shoulders back. Improving posture means
strengthening how the body balances, and how it moves. Though there is no one perfect posture, there are better and worse postures. Posture is not just how you stand, but it’s also how you balance your body when you sit. We live in a sitting society. Sitting is the 21st century posture, and our couch potato lifehabits are a primary cause of the epidemic of back pain and other motion-based problems afflicting our society.
The bent-over posture of a 60-year-old woman with a dowager’s hump has its seeds in the posture of a 16-year-old girl slumping in front of the TV for hours on end. Also, poor adaptive posture habits usually worsen with age, causing chronic problems such as neck and back pain, stress and chronic fatigue.
The human body is designed to walk and run, not sit. When we stand erect we can use our eyes to see ahead, walk upright, and use our hands to wave at a friend, throw a rock, or gather berries. To stand erect, we must balance the three postural weight centers of the human frame: the head, the chest, and the pelvis. The problem begins when we work the deep core muscles balancing our body in only a small part of their full range of motion– muscles adapt and atrophy, and over time the characteristic slump of old age develops. Now, this is not to say that everyone has poor posture. But if you spend a big chunk of your life sitting, unless you are actively doing something to counteract your habits, your posture will suffer.
