What is Posture Correction?
These days, with the widespread use of cellphones, computers, excess sitting and for various other reasons, most people have, to put it bluntly…really bad posture. According to Dr. Kawa, forward head posture (FHP) is epidemic in our society and he is seeing it in almost all his patients over the age of 13 or so.
The reason that FHP is so pervasive is because when you spend a lot of time sitting with your head and shoulders forward, the muscles in the front of the neck and chest become shortened, and the muscles in the back of the neck and upper back become lengthened and tight. This is called “Upper Crossed Syndrome”, a term coined by a world-renowned Physiatrist Vladimir Janda.
What Can You Do About It?
The question becomes, how can you fix forward head posture and forward slumping of the rest of the spine? Well, at Discover Chiropractic, Dr. Kawa is an expert at helping you fix your posture. The first thing he usually does is to take x-rays to measure the spine and the extent of the posture deviation. In addition to x-rays, he will usually perform a surface EMG scan to look at how the muscles along the spine are pulling.
The next step is to use specialized spinal adjusting techniques to create movement in the “fixated” or stuck vertebrae. This allows the body to “unwind” out of its high-toned muscle pattern and to begin of relaxing and getting itself into a better balance and alignment.
Then, Dr. Kawa and his assistants will spend some time teaching posture correction techniques that involve certain exercises and static and active stretching. These posture protocol exercises can be
