“Posture” is the flat-Earth approach to movement. It doesn’t exist, only motion does. A frame’s snapshot is not the motion picture: the “movie” (MOVIE!) The concept of posture can’t accurately depict your body and can’t even produce movement (called “Zeno’s Paradox”).
This will upset many people whose livelihood depends upon postural analysis to justify their work, but I’m not particularly concerned about upsetting others.
The concept derived from the Latin word, positūra: “to place, put or theorize in a certain way.” The idea for posture came from Da Vinci’s Vitruvan Man, a model of “ideal human form” founded on the architectural work of civil and military engineer, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio.
Most people believe they have poor posture today, a belief feeding profits to postural experts. You cannot ever have “ideal posture” – only a computer generated model can. No actual human can.
A more accurate depiction of the human body is one of “Biotensegrity” – a sea of continuous tension (movement) pulling in, with floating struts pushing out creating a gravity-defying act of locomotion; (“standing” is a MOVEMENT where all internal forces equal zero). This concept, was created by my teacher, Dr Stephen Levin, which he learned from architect Buckminster Fuller.
There is no ideal or proper posture. There is only dramatically-rapid and glacially-slow movement through compensated (long and loose tissue) and compensating (short and tight tissue) patterns. Inside these patterns of tissues, your bones float like a rubber ball stretched over a thicket of sticks, so your bony alignment (“posture”) can no more represent your current state than a boat can represent tidal flow.
You can only fix “posture” through specifically targeted exercise: strengthening compensated movement patterns and releasing compensating patterns.
Therefore, there are no also such things as “functional movement patterns” either. What is “functional” but a belief in an objective optimal pattern? Your function is merely equilibrium.
Your body only requires (what I call) “Compensatory Exercise” to address your CURRENT, individualized state (of biotensegrity). Tomorrow, you will be different; and then, so should your exercise; like a boat that tacks its sails back and forth adjusting to the changing winds in order to propel itself across the waves and current.
Six Degree Flow will help you find your daily act of re-balancing. Find it at www.SixDegreeFlow.com
Very Respectfully,
Scott B. Sonnon
TACFIT Founder
