Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Slim without losing weight
If there's one thing that affects how you look, it's your posture. If we've got the tendency to slouch, stoop or collapse in stature, naturally we are reducing our overall height and this can cause a myriad of problems. Not only do we cause stiffness, back problems, affect the digestive and breathing functions in our body, we will also appear 'down' as well as probably personally insecure and lacking stature. We will be compressing our tummy and the effect is for our internal organs to be displaced forwards, so our tummy sticks out.
A client left me earlier this morning feeling and looking taller as his back now supports him better. I asked if he was losing weight for any reason and he said this was not the case. However he looked slimmer as his tummy has returned into his pelvic basin rather than being pushed forward with his old slouch. Changed days.
Another client comes to mind, a middle-aged lady who was not fat, but may have been described as 'cuddly'. She used to wear her blouse out, so disguising her middle. After a number of sessions in the Alexander Technique, she was standing much taller and started to tuck her blouse into her skirt or trousers. She felt that she had got her waist back again.
If we're collapsing in stature, there's only one place for our tummy to go as it's put under pressure, and that's forwards. However if we start to lengthen in stature, the distance from our groin to our throat becomes greater, as does the vertical space between our hip and our shoulder. So what was squashed and therefore spreading, becomes taller and slimmer.
The way to do it is to make yourself very free and loose, then to 'think' your head to go in an upwards direction so you lengthen in stature. No effort is required and indeed it should be avoided. Effort only causes stiffness and tension, and is not natural in terms of having good, healthy poise. Our postural mechanism works by the need of our head to be at our highest point. Young children only seek to be up tall like Mum and Dad, for their backs to support them admirably. So if we 'think' and 'send' our head up to where we want to be (high at our full height) our body musculature will oblige.
Sadly, most adults do not have memory of how this all worked for them when they were young, and they don't trust it will work now. It's just that we can do it consciously whereas it happened by instinct as children. But we can revive our poise if we take more conscious control. If you give it an experiment, you'll find that you do start to come up tall, and your back muscles will once again do the job they were designed to do. And that is, support you at your full height. Your tummy may well restore itself to it's proper location in your pelvis rather than being pushed forwards.
But all this doesn't diminish the benefits of losing a bit of weight if we need to.....says I having just lost a fw pounds after an 'enjoyable' festive season!
Think loose, think tall and do yourself a whole lot of good.
:-)
(Principles outlined are based on the Alexander Technique)
