Top 8 Benefits of Having a Good Posture and How to achieve it?

What is a good posture exactly?

A good posture is the conscious action of the body’s muscles to keep the body parts aligned with one another and with the spine to deliver influential body language.

Skeletal muscles in our body are the key muscles to maintaining good posture while sitting or standing.

Correct posture involves a straight spine, which maintains the natural curve of the spine in your body.

Here’s a quick guide to a good sitting posture:

• Your feet should touch the floor
• Your legs are not crossed
• Your shoulders are relaxed
• Your elbows are close to your body and bent between 90 and 120 degrees
• Your back is fully supported by the backrest of the chair
• Your thighs and hips are supported and parallel to the floor

Here’s a quick guide to a good standing posture:

• Standing up straight and tall
• Your shoulders back
• Your stomach is in
• Your weight is on the balls of your feet
• Your head leveled
• Your arms rest aside naturally

A good posture not only counts strong and flexible muscles, but it also counts your health. On contrary, stiff, weak, and tight muscles bring about poor posture, and a misaligned body and predispose you to several health issues.

Here’s what a good posture can offer you:

1. Reduced Lower Back Pain

Prolonged Sitting or standing in a slouched position can cause discomfort in the lower back.

A good posture can relieve back pain and reduce the functional disabilities connected with back pain.

2. Relieved Shoulder and Neck

Neck–shoulder pain comes hand in hand with a prolonged sitting job.

Constrained sitting posture for a prolonged period results in sustained muscle activation, which is a presumed causal factor for neck–shoulder pain.

Prolonged sitting may also increase intradiscal pressure, and creates spinal loads that are approximately 25% greater than standing.

3. Lesser Headache

Headache can potentially decrease your ability to concentrate and affect your daily activities and lower your work output.

Neck stiffness, forward head posture, trigger points in the cervical musculature, and restricted cervical motion can even trigger migraine attacks or chronic migraines if overlooked.

However, postural correction and massage therapy can collectively reduce the frequency of headaches and the risk of occurrence of migraine.

4. Boosted Energy Levels

A good posture can keep your bones and joints in alignment and eventually minimize the strain on your muscles and skeleton. This will minimize your extra energy expenditure and boost your stamina to keep you active for daily chores.

5. Increased Breathing Capacity

Sustaining poor ergonomic postures while on computers, laptops, TV, or mobiles for prolonged hours can lead to the development of forwarding head posture.

Continuous and repetitively accommodating to these positions turn into a deformity that causes neck and upper back pain, stiffness, shallow breathing, and breathing dysfunction eventually.

However, a good posture can control your breathing capacity in a way that your lungs get more breathing space with a straight body posture.

6. Ease Digestion

Sitting in slumped position can significantly compress your stomach and gut by decreasing the activity of the internal obliques (mid abdominal muscles) and transversus abdominis (deepest abdominal muscles) when compared to an upright posture.

Also, the diaphragm, which is located below the lungs provides space for the movement of food through your gut.

Slouching and hunching exert unnatural tension on your diaphragm, preventing its natural functioning.

7. Improved Blood Circulation

A good posture can ensure proper blood circulation, which further ensures a sufficient supply of nutrients and oxygen to all body parts.

On the contrary, a poor posture will compromise effective blood circulation and decrease your functional output.

8. Make You Look Tall

A good posture might not increase your height genetically but it will surely maximize your actual height.

On the contrary, slouching and hunching make you stand less tall than your actual height.

Further, maintaining a good sitting posture for extended periods can create stress on lower back muscles sometimes.

Try these 6 easy and effective poses to get visibly improved posture within 2 weeks with supplementary health benefits:

1. Child Pose or Balasana

Benefits:

• Stretches your spine, quadriceps, hamstrings, buttocks, and ankle
• Improves blood circulation
• Improves digestion
• Relieves stress on the lower back, chest, hamstring muscles, and shoulder muscles.

2. Forward Fold or Uttanasana

Benefits:

• Stretches your hips, thighs, knees, calves
• Relieves stress on your spine, neck, and lower back
• Also works for asthma, headaches, and insomnia
• Improves digestion
• Maintains Hypertension
• Natural remedy for infertility, osteoporosis, and sinusitis

3. Cat Cow or Chakravakasana

Benefits:

• Improves flexibility of the spine
• Improves body balance
• Strengthens and stretches the spine and neck
• Stretches buttocks, upper back
• Good for slimming waistline

4. Camel Pose or Ustrasana

Benefits:

• Improves your posture and counteracts the effects of prolonged sitting
• Improves the curvature of the spine
• Strengthens back muscles and relieves back pain.
• Reinforces hamstrings muscles, and glute muscles.

5. High Plank

Benefits:

• Strengthens entire body muscles
• Helps develop isometric strength in your core muscles to get flat abs
• Prevents you from hunching while standing or sitting for long hours
• Balance strengthens your arms, wrists, core, and spine
• Reduces the risk of back injury

6. Pigeon Pose

Benefits:

• Supports mobility and flexibility in joint
• stretches your hip flexors and lower back
• Improves digestion
• Maintains your shoulders, upper back, and lower back in a neutral position while sitting or standing.

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