Posture assessment: confidential 04

Assessment request via email. 
 

Posture assessment

 

Apologies for the wait. 

The images aren't ideal as they are taken from an angle and with a fair bit of distortion, so it's kinda hard to decode the left / right imbalances, but I'll make do with what's available. 

First of all your feet. You are placing them unevenly. Seems like you are placing your right food ahead of the left (habitually). Since you are on an angle to the straight edges in your house (walls / floor etc). it's hard to see, but the rest of your pattern suggests that right foot is placed ahead of left. We will get back to it later. 

Most of the useful information comes from the side view - I have placed a green plumb line (adjusted to the vertical door behind) and this plumb line always starts at the front of the ankle (the blue marker). There are other markers, for your knees, iliacs (anterior superior iliac spine),  bottom and top sternum. All of these blue markers would ideally be on the green plumbline - in order to have a properly functioning mechanism. 

Let's look at the main part of your mechanism - your torso. That is your lower torso - pelvis, your upper torso - ribcage and the middle torso, which is your spine and abdominal cavity. 

You can see that you are rotating your pelvis forward and down, bringing the iliacs too much forward (and down) and of course lifting your sacrum up (logically, as the sacrum and the iliacs are both parts of the same object - pelvis). On this image of your right side view, we could say that the pelvis is rotating anticlockwise. 

Then, you have the yellow rectangle, your ribcage, that is being rotated in exactly the opposite way to the pelvis. That is, you are pulling the top of your ribcage backwards and pushing the bottom of it forwards. We could say, this rotation is clockwise as seen on the image. 

So now you have two fairly rigid objects (pelvis and ribcage) that are rotating in opposing directions. Inbetween of these two objects is your spine. Highly articulated set of joints, that will adopt a shape depending on the movements of the pelvis underneath and ribcage above. That should explain why your lowerback is arched the way it is (red curve). 

If you would learn to rotate the pelvis and the ribcage in their reverse directions (so rotate the pelvis clockwise and the ribcage anticlockwise), you would start straightening the lowerback arch, which is exactly what we want. 

Such rotation would also bring the iliacs on the green line, as well as your bottom and top sternum. As I said earlier, this is desired for proper functioning of the mechanism. 

Let's get back to the feet position and the left / right imbalances. 

It goes like this for you: right foot forward to the left, same for right knee and right hip. So now, you are pushing the right side of your lower body to the front. Because of equilibrium, you also have to compensate for that, so what you are doing is retracting your right arm further back in relation to your torso. That is the reason why your right shoulder is higher up (compared to left) and why the right scapula is little more prominent on the back view. 

It all seems to be very common postural issues. Nothing out of the ordinary. You can learn to move the parts of your mechanism differently, to obtain better shape of your mechanism and in turn also a better functioning. 

If you have any more questions or things aren't clear, feel free to get back in touch.