A postural assessment is crucial for any fitness or strength program. If not, your efforts could be going to waste and leading you towards injury. Here is a quick video explaining why postural assessment is so important.
TRANSCRIPT
Hi there. I just wanted to quickly jump onto a Facebook live. I had a really great question a couple of days ago from a new client. And the question was as we’re going through explaining what we’re going to do, which was a bio-mechanical/postural assessment.
Look, it was a really interesting question because this client had had actually seen some other personal trainers before. And I was really surprised that they actually haven’t done any sort of postural assessment. So the question about why is it important, I think, look, I’ll answer that, but again, I was probably a little bit surprised it hadn’t been asked because like any other professionals, if you’re building a house, you assess the land that you’re going to build on. Same thing in regard to a financial planner. You actually have a look at someone’s asset position first to then determine what the right course of action is.
Personal Training
Same way from a personal training point of view. We need to have a look at the muscles that are tight. We need to have a look at the muscles that are weak. So if we strengthen a tight muscle, there’s a high risk of injury. And if we then stretch a weak muscle, same thing, you’re going to get injured. Look, is really critical in regards to doing the postural assessment so that we get a really good understanding of the landscape that that body is to really give you the right sort of exercises.
Example
So to give you a rough idea, as an example, say a common one. A lot of people sit down in their job. So as a result of that, sitting down through the hip, is it going to have some tight hip flexors because it’s actually in a tightened position, which also then means that the opposite muscles to the hip flexors, their lower back is going to be a little bit tight to try and stabilise the hip. They’re going to be more quad dominant and so they need to do a little bit more hamstring strength work, quad releases, hip flexor releases, lower back releases. So that’s stretches. And generally, you’re going to get that kind of like forward head positioning coming in through here. You’re going to have the shoulders coming in and collapsing in.
So we’re not going to do some chest exercises for someone like that. We might do some chest stretches because if you then load that up, it’s only going to create neck problems. It’s only going to create lower back problems. So definitely sort of getting that postural assessment is really going to give us a good understanding of that.
Benefits
So I suppose to answer the question that my client had on the postural stuff is that, as a base level, it actually increases your … reduces your injuries, it increases your energy, less stress on the body overall, so you got improved breathing, circulation, and increased lymphatic drainage, increases your muscle fibre recruitment. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s something that should actually be happening all the time.
So to answer the question, it’s just those couple of things, reducing injury and getting the best out of your workouts. So thank you for asking the question. I thought it was a given so I was a little bit surprised that someone that’s done personal training before hasn’t been exposed to doing some postural assessment. But I just wanted to jump on quickly, let you know that it is pretty important, that you should be doing it at the start of any sort of training programme, any strength programme.
And when I finish this live, I will actually put a link onto our blog post talking about some of the conditions and some of the things that you need to be thinking about with that. But again, thank you for the question. Thank you for your time. And I hope you got some value out of that. So have a good night. See you later.
https://www.corehealthcoaching.com.au/good-posture/
Cameron Corish has been caring and achieving results for the local Wishart, Mansfield and Mt Gravatt community for over 10 years. Together with the Core Health Coaching Team, he takes a multi-disciplined and holistic approach to health and fitness addressing the physical, mental and emotional aspects of one’s health.
Ready to feel and look your best? Book a time for a FREE chat and see how we can make a difference in your life. Book here calendly.com/corehealthcoaching or email Cameron at cameron@corehealthcoaching.com.au
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