Skin-deep Posture and Movement

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Skin-deep Posture and Movement

I recently recommended to a Skype coaching client that he read pages 131-132 in The New Rules of Posture–pages that describe what I nicknamed “skintelligence”.  One of this man’s goals was to improve his ballroom dancing. His partners had commented that they felt he was holding them rigidly, so I wanted to remind him of the surprising degree to which our tactile sense influences motor coordination.  I knew that turning on his skin could help him turn off excess muscle tension…

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Important News About Your Pelvis

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Important News About Your Pelvis

Looking back at my recent video posts, I see that I’ve been focusing on the pelvis and hips.  That’s not so surprising, because experience has shown me that if your pelvis is balanced and adaptable, then many other aspects of good posture will follow.  In my book and DVD I call the pelvis “The Root of Posture.”

This video adds another detail to our pelvis investigations.  It introduces anatomical information that can help change the way you sit, the way you connect to your deep corset muscles, and the way you stand, walk and dance…

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Your Hamstrings and Your Posture

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Your Hamstrings and Your Posture

If you look for  “hamstring stretches”  in Google Images, you’ll get a page full of illustrations most of which demonstrate what  I’m  trying to show you not to do in the accompanying video. This young man, for example, is mostly stretching his lower back and giving himself a crick in his neck.  How you position your pelvis and spine makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of your stretching.  I also hope to convince you that your hamstrings don’t exist in isolation in your body and that to lengthen them effectively involves changing how you use them in daily life…

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Know Your Hips!

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Know Your Hips!

This started out to be a video blog about the way short, tight hamstrings impact your posture. But in order to stretch your hamstrings effectively,  you’ll need some information about your hips joints. So, first things first…

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On Pilates and Core Strength

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On Pilates and Core Strength

As the author of The New Rules of Posture, you might think I’d be a paragon of deep abdominal core strength. Sadly, not true. In fact, shortly after the book was published I was beset by an embarrassing bout of low back pain—a sure sign of low toned abs. And this wasn’t the first such episode—I’d been plagued by a back that “went out” pretty regularly for 15 years. Because I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of Rolfing© Structural Integration, I continued to assume that the pain was due to misalignment, and that more structural bodywork was what I needed. But I also saw the occasional chiropractor…

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When to Build Good Posture

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When to Build Good Posture

When do you become most aware of your posture? When you’re checking out the fit of some new jeans? When walking into a new situation, uncertain as to how you might be received? You can be dressed to the nines, but if your posture projects shyness or uncertainty it sabotages the impression you want to convey. But by then, it’s too late to develop good posture…

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