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Postural and Corrective Exercise

What is Postural and Corrective Exercise?

Postural and Corrective exercise is a broad term used to describe the types of exercises used in order to improve a person’s limited movement capabilities, poor posture and muscle weaknesses.  

Limited movements and weakness can develop for many different sources:

  • Imbalanced workout routine: favoring certain muscle groups over others (especially the antagonists muscle group). This can easily be seen by people who train their chest a lot but don’t do an even amount of work on their back leading to the arms rolling into the body.
  • One side dominate sport such as tennis, baseball or golf. Generating torque through the body in one direction can lead to muscle imbalances that can ultimately lead to pain and dysfunction.
  • Long Standing sitting or being in one dominate posture the whole day. The classic example for this is the modern desk worker, but also musicians, artists, drivers and the various types of manual labor are ways we end up spending way too much time in one position. Being in one main posture throughout the day means that your joints and tissues don’t get moved through their full range of motion often which leads to the body adapting to THAT position, inhibiting its functionality in other planes of motion. 
  • Past Injuries: this can be any injury where the original pain has come and gone but may have left you with an inefficient movement pattern/ joint restriction which originally was useful to assist in healing the injury, but could now be the cause of your current pain. 
 

Although we can create a huge amount of positive change on the treatment table, it is imperative to get those changes to last. 

The time spent in the treatment room is an extremely small amount of time compared to what you do with your body the rest of the week (and beyond). We need to use postural and corrective exercise therapy to consistently feed your body the new inputs we want to take hold. 

But more importantly, I want to make my patients as self-reliant as possible, empowering them with tools to make care of themselves.

These are done throughout the day (possibly at specific times, depending on what we are trying to improve) with minimal equipment and effort.