The importance of the Posture and easy exercise for a good posture

It is common knowledge that we should maintain good posture. However, when looking around while walking, people have lost the sense of good posture. That is a sign of deteriorating interoceptive awareness—that internal sense of self that tells you how you feel inside and senses hunger, thirst, and alignments of your bodyparts. We get used to the forward-tilted head and wonder why we get headaches and neck pain. 

We get used to slouching and wonder why our digestive system is slow, and it is hard to breathe. We would feel much better with a minor adjustment—lifting our heads up and aligning our spine. We should know to hold a good posture.

Many symptoms may seem totally unrelated to bad posture, but when we dig deeper, we find that bad posture and poor internal alignment are the root causes. We should remember that the nerves that go to our heart and lungs come through between the vertebrae, and as you can see from the picture below, the neck region serves our breathing and heart rate. A forward tilt with your head compromises those neural connections and adds weight to your head due to gravitational pull, causing strain to the muscles in your middle back. Keeping your head up - lifting from the base of your skull- not only elongates your spine but also minimizes the effect of the gravitational pull on your head and body and allows your nerves to function freely. 

This is an easy exercise we can all do anytime, and it is the beginning of better health:

Activate your 3 Dan Tians daily. 

1.) Lift up your head by elongating your spine from the base of your skull.

2.) When you feel a lift in your thorax, follow the feeling and let your solar plexus pull your chest open.

3.) Follow that pull and let your solar plexus pull your belly up and inwards. Tuck in the tummy and create internal flow from your lower Dan Tian to your Lower Back by aligning your pelvis and gravitational pull. 

4.) Feel the elongated spine and how it ignites the support from the muscles around it. 

5.) Maintain good posture and breathe deep into your belly. Make sure to activate the diagram.

6.) This position and breathing combination will boost your vitality through better breathing capacity and free neural connections to the heart and lungs. 

7.) Long-term effects include better blood flow all over your body and brain, which gives your brain more nutrients and oxygen and creates better conditions to fight stress and be aware. Your organs also have the room they need and can function optimally. 

8.) Do all that with feeling—feel the connections and let your brain analyze your sensations. This will create a beautiful balance in your body and mindful grounding in all you do.

This basic-level exercise from the Integrated Structural Training method will awaken your interoceptive awareness and increase your well-being. 

After over a decade of studies, tests, and analyses of different issues that I encounter in my clinic and our classes, we thought we needed to rebuild that baseline to gain better outcomes in all physical and mental challenges and tasks. IST is now ready to help you understand your well-being and how to better your physical tasks and sports activities with structural integrity, awareness, and fascial chain activation. We learned that some Kung Fu techniques did not work for our students because of internal misalignment; once those were repaired, the techniques and strength were easy to improve.