Posture Must Be Consistent
Following my blog about Brianne Grogan’s Ebook, FemFusion Fitness for Intimacy, that highlighted healthy muscle relaxation, there have been some outstanding questions about what to focus on throughout daily activities. If we know we need to strengthen our entire pelvic basket in our workouts, and we know we need to be able to achieve complete relaxation of these muscles when voiding and when lying down at rest, then what should our focus be throughout the remainder of the day?
The Answer is Posture! And posture is positioning! Let’s go back and review optimal postural positioning, highlighted in the Hab-It DVD and many of my blogs.
To obtain optimal posture, you should work to hold equal weight on each foot. You want to have “soft knees,” meaning that your legs are straight but you are able to wiggle your knees a bit (i.e., they are not locked back). Your hips and low back should be held in neutral spine, which means that you are not standing with your buns tucked under nor are you standing in a gymnast’s posture either. Rather, you should hold your spine between these two extremes so that you have a slight lift of your tail bone and a soft lumbar curve. To finish up through your spine, simply open up your hands. This simple action is subtle but it has huge effects, because it rolls your shoulders back and, where your shoulders go, your head will follow.
If your focus is on optimal postural positioning, you put every muscle in your body at the perfect length/tension to fire as needed. Re-read that statement. Appropriate positioning puts just the right amount of tension in your muscles because they will be stretched to just the right length. This allows them to fire efficiently before every reach, every push, and every pull.
What a focus on posture does not do is require a strong active contraction of our pelvic floor or pelvic basket. We simply have to set their position. Two areas of our body that I want to compare in this blog entry on positioning are our external rotators in our shoulders and our pelvic basket of muscles that stabilize our pelvis.