understanding your posture and reducing physical …€¦ · if you know of someone else that may...
TRANSCRIPT
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
Upright © 2016. All rights reserved.
This report has been made to help anyone who is struggling with a condition that no one
else has been able to fix, or for athletes who want to improve physical performance.
If you know of someone else that may benefit, please share by email, social media,
whatever!
Please just give me the credit for my work.
The information contained within this document is given in good faith and is believed to be
accurate, appropriate and reliable at the time it is given.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
What is your posture?
Your posture is the shape of your
body and this is dictated by your
skeleton. The reason for this is
gravity. Gravity is a pretty strong
force. It stops us flying off into space
as the Earth spins. Its effect means
that we are constantly being pulled
towards the centre of the Earth. This
means that in order to be upright, our
skeleton has to be stable.
A stable skeleton will be balanced front to back and side to side. Your weight
will go through the area between your feet and you’ll be able to stand up with
next to no effort from your muscles. When you move, you will use the
minimum amount of effort required. This is totally different from what you
have been told by other people who say that you can improve your posture by
strengthening and stretching your muscles.
Standing should be
effortless.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
Why you have poor posture
From what I have said above, you can probably work out the answer to this.
Poor posture is due to changes in the resting shape of your skeleton. Your
skeleton can be thought of like a frame (like on a bicycle). If it is crooked, it
won’t work properly.
Here are some examples of the type of changes that can occur.
In all of the pictures above, the person is standing relaxed. Can you see how
the people on in grey would be unstable and off balance?
The people in grey are in pretty bad shape but, most people will have some
degree of change to their frame which will affect their posture. What they also
have in common is that they are tipping forward.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
What happens when your posture is forward?
This picture shows a tall structure
which is helped to stay upright by
guy wires. If the structure became
crooked or started to lean, some guy
wires would go slack and others
would get tighter. Up to a point, the
structure could stay upright, even
though it wasn’t balanced.
Courtesy of: Flameout
You can try this out on yourself right now. Stand up and lean forward. You will
notice that;
The muscles in the back of your neck, your back, hamstrings, calves
and feet (posterior chain) tighten up
The muscles in the front of your neck, abdomen and thighs (anterior
chain) relax
Now lean back, you will notice that the opposite happens. This is called
reciprocal inhibition and prevents your muscles fighting against each other.
So, if your frame is stuck in a forward position, your posterior chain will always
be tight and your anterior chain will be slack. This makes sense, as the most
common injuries occur in the posterior chain and, people struggle to develop
their abdominal muscles (because they are inhibited).
What I’ve just described above, is what
your body does to compensate for a
crooked frame. The areas of your body
that tend to get injured, hurt, become
stiff or get arthritis are areas of
compensation.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
So what causes your frame to become crooked?
The cause of a crooked frame is a very common type of injury that your body
finds impossible to fix by itself. But you may never have even heard of it. It is;
A bone that has been pushed out of place in a direction that your body
cannot self-correct
This type of injury is responsible for much of the suffering happening today.
Many of your aches, pains, weaknesses, wear and tear and suchlike (i.e. your
compensations), are the result of your body trying to cope with the above type
of injury.
Believe it or not, your bones are being pushed and pulled about on a daily
basis. I’m not talking about dislocations but much smaller changes. Your body
can self-correct many of these changes, as long as there is a muscle or a
combination of muscles that can pull the bone back to the right position.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to self-correct in every direction
possible so, this leaves us with a major vulnerability.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
What sort of injuries am I talking about?
Since you were born, your body has had a lot of physical injuries. You literally
will have had tens of thousands.
Some examples are;
birth trauma
falls whilst learning to walk
banging your head
sporting injuries
sitting awkwardly or for too long
lifting badly
motor accidents
work related injuries
surgery
tripping or stubbing your toe
fights
knocking into things
Every one of those injuries (and more) has the potential to change your
posture. The bigger or more repeated the injury is, the more likely it is to leave
damage. Thankfully, our bodies have an incredible ability to heal most of this.
However, when we cannot correct our posture, our bodies will compensate.
Compensations are an amazing adaptation that allows you to continue living.
Without them, you would be in big trouble! However, there is a price to pay
and it is that they reduce your level of function. The more you need to
compensate, the more problems you get, as your muscles, joints and skeleton
work harder. The result is that you get stiffer and tighter.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
How can you correct these bones?
Like most people, it is likely that you are stuck in some form of compensation
posture. This means that whenever you are standing or sitting, your body
wants to fall over and you have to work extra hard to stay upright. There is a
part of your brain that does this correction automatically without you even
being aware. To help take some strain off your muscles you may lean on
things, prop yourself up, cross your arms or legs, or use a walking aid.
In time, the areas of your body working the hardest, will start to fail and may
become painful. You can take drugs, apply heat/cold, massage, stretch,
strengthen, tape, needle, etc. to relieve the symptoms. However, none of
these things will fix the underlying problem if you have a crooked posture.
Even surgery doesn’t fix the true cause.
The only way to get rid of the problem properly is to rebalance your frame.
When you do this, your body will remove its compensations all by itself, as
they are no longer needed. This is amazing news!
The protocol I use at Upright
is called Advanced
Biostructural CorrectionTM
(ABCTM
for short). It is a
system which detects and
corrects the position of the
bones that are at the root of
your problem. It is also the
only system that can non-
surgically remove the deep
scar tissue that builds up as a result of your injuries. This scar tissue keeps you
stuck and without removing it, you won’t progress.
The longer you have had your problem, the longer it takes to undo the damage
and unwind all of your compensations. However, the small changes from the
very first visit will begin improving your symptoms immediately. This is what
makes ABCTM
so great!
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
If you’ve ever trained or worked hard
towards something, you’ll know that
it took time and effort. Whether it
was excellence in a sport, your job,
education, or a hobby. You can make
life easier by training smart, having
the right coach and being consistent
but, ultimately, you still have to put
in some work.
What I am trying to say is, that there is no magic bullet or gizmo that does it all
for you. Changing your posture is a process which needs the right approach,
support and encouragement and, some effort! However, I have made it very
simple to follow and the longer we work on your posture, the better you will
get.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
Common compensations and “being forward”
There are thousands of compensation patterns you can be stuck in depending
on what injuries you’ve had, when they happened and how your body
compensated to each one. On a joint by joint basis things get very complicated
but if we look at the overall picture we see common patterns.
Have you ever noticed how people hunch forwards as they get older? Have you
ever seen someone hunched backwards? No, neither have I and there is a
reason for that. Commonly it is our spine that gets injured. From the neck
down we cannot pull back a bone that has gone forwards.
So, if a bone does go forward, everything above that point will
be falling “forward” too and a compensation will be set up in a
more stable part of your body to keep you balanced. For
instance, you may start to get knee pain several years after you
injured your lower back. I bet you never thought the two things
were related? Hopefully by now, you are starting to see that
they almost certainly are. The body is an amazing machine and
everything is connected.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
If you have ever played Jenga you will know
that you cannot keep taking blocks from the
same side or it will fall over.
If you have a bone out of place that your
body cannot self-correct, your brain has the
ability to decide which blocks (body parts) to
compensate in order to keep you upright.
This is why you may think you have recovered from an injury, only to suffer
again down the line. Your body didn’t fix you, it compensated. Each time you
re-injure that area, you are getting worse.
As time passes, your body is able to stiffen up areas of stress leading to muscle
shortening, tendinopathy, calcification and osteoarthritis. Don’t forget that you
will be accumulating more injuries in the meantime! We call this process
“winding up”. This is how things can get very complicated.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
Posture and organ function
So, if your body has become crooked what else happens?
Well, everything inside you also becomes crooked too. This includes your
organs - muscles, brain, spinal cord, intestines, liver, heart, eyes; everything.
This is why your posture affects everything about you. How you feel and how
your body works.
When your insides are being stretched, compressed and twisted, you can get
all sorts of other problems.
Commonly, you may have
Brain fog (feeling a bit hazy and unfocused)
Muscle weakness or fatigue
Digestive issues such as heartburn or reflux (your stomach is getting
compressed and squeezing food back up your oesophagus)
Trapped wind
Shortness of breath
Numbness or tingling
The complete list is too long because as I said above, everything is affected
because everything is connected.
Are you taking medications
for some of these
conditions? Those
medications will not be
fixing the underlying
problem and will have
harmful side-effects.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
Posture and stress
Everyone knows that stress is something that happens in your head, right?
Well that is where the stress response is triggered. But the trigger itself can
come from many sources.
Emotional or mental stress is triggered by our thoughts.
Chemical stress is triggered by some drugs, toxins, toxicants, viruses, etc.
Physical stress is triggered by excess or prolonged injury/strain.
If your posture has changed, it is important to realise that you will be triggering
your stress response very frequently. This causes a huge amount of hidden
stress that most people are not aware of. This is important as chronic (long
term) stress is a major factor in poor overall health.
The great news is that a reduction in any of the stress triggers will help the
whole stress response to reduce, which is great for your health and wellbeing!
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
In conclusion
Your posture dictates your function. The worse your posture, the more
problems you are likely to have.
These problems are likely to worsen as you get older.
A mild problem could prevent you from hitting that PB in the gym.
A moderate problem can lead to disability.
A major problem can threaten your life.
So, I hope you have now learned the basics of posture (and a few other useful
tips too).
If you have received this booklet via my website, over the next few weeks, I
will be sending you some more information about posture and your health in
general. This will include tips on how to reduce physical stress.
Please share this document. I have found that most people are not aware that
they could be pain free and living well. No matter how bad your situation, it
can be improved!
If you feel that this is not for you. The option to unsubscribe will be present on
your first email.
Lucky Gidda BEng MChiro
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS
Lucky Gidda www.uprightposture.co.uk
H
About Lucky Gidda and Upright Posture Correction
I, I’m the founder of Upright. I’ve studied as an Aerospace Engineer
and a Chiropractor so I have a unique perspective on physical health
and fitness.
Due to various injuries from a
young age, I have been on a
quest to fix myself for some
years. Over this time, I have
found that many commonly
used therapies are ineffective. In
2014 I came upon a very
promising protocol and I have
found it to be the most complete
and effective therapy yet for chronic physical injuries. The protocol is called
ABCTM
and I have been using it exclusively since then, on myself and on my
clients, with astounding results!
Upright was formed to help educate and increase awareness of the importance
of posture and the benefits that ABCTM
can achieve.
My clinic in Birmingham is one of only a few using ABCTM
in the UK, where you
can come to achieve levels of function and fitness you never thought possible.
My Kick-start programme helps to quickly eliminate many common symptoms
that people suffer with on a day-to-day basis. This 90 day programme removes
enough damage so as to allow my clients to return to work or get back to doing
a physical activity they enjoy.
The Regenerate programme is designed to continue the unwinding process
until you are happy with your level of function. For most people, the sky is the
limit.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR POSTURE AND REDUCING PHYSICAL STRESS