A red flag that your physio, pain coach, yoga teacher or movement professional is seeing dollar signs when they look at you is their conversation around the importance of posture assessment, corrections or analysis.
Human beings are perfectly imperfect and imbalanced. From iris to ears, knees to noses and spines to squats we are all different from our own left to right and those of everyone else on the planet. Aligning to the idea that symmetry is an ideal, let alone an achievable goal, is pointless and research shows us that old fashioned approaches of treating the body as a machine are now completely redundant.
We are varied and fluid complex biological organisms, ecosystems with huge variations from bone shape and size to muscle density and length – even homeostasis, a state of balance for good bodily function, is wildly active and dynamic so the rigid idea of mechanical function is like trying to bash a square peg into a round hole.
We are all normally abnormal and capable of incredibly adaptation but there is still the urge to medicalise and pathologise everything from how we stand & walk to how we down dog and overhead press in order to point out invisible, irrelevant, faults, flaws and imbalances – usually with a view to paying for sessions to ‘correct’ you, ‘align’ you, ‘rebalance’ you or ‘improve’ your performance.
It is worth remembering that there isn’t money to be made in reassuring people they are inherently robust and capable and guiding them towards self efficacy – whether that’s in a clinic or a class.
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