Definition of "Posture"
Clinically stated "posture" is the independent and interdependent alignment and function of all muscles of the body at any given time. Essentially this means that our skeleton is a collection of bones, which are held together and moved by muscles (and other soft tissue.)

Children Have Perfectly Balanced Muscles
When we start out as children, our muscles are still perfectly balanced and capable of doing their intended jobs. We are able to flex and bend at all the right places, our spine still retains its natural S-curve and therefore children are able to fall down and spring back up and recover. Little children don’t wake up in the morning and complain about a stiff back.

Restricting Mobility Causes Misalignments
What happens in the interim from childhood to adulthood is that we neglect to let our muscles do their intended jobs. We all live our daily lives performing repetitive movements, confining our bodies to smaller spaces and drastically restricting mobility. Over the span of many years this causes postural misalignments. We have started to accept the myth that we get stiffer and “less flexible” as we age. Maybe we have an injury and accept that the body will never completely recover from it. Or maybe we just wear our purse on the right shoulder, or always cross the right over the left leg when we sit in a chair, or play only one sport etc. So whether we succumb to comfort or force of habit: we manage to overuse some muscles and underutilize others. We allow imbalances to form and when we ask the body to perform with these imbalances, it compensates and gets the required task done with muscles that are not intended for the particular job. As a result our bodies, in their great capacity to resist gravity and stay erect, start to assume that the misalignment is correct. The “mistake” becomes the body’s point of reference for straightness. Since the body always uses itself “as is” it will be misaligned when performing any physical activity.

Postural Therapy As Body "Maintentance"
Think of a computer: when you bring it home from the store it works great…but everybody knows to install anti virus protection and spam protection or the computer will succumb to the constant bombardment of viruses and such things. If we don’t keep up the maintenance on our computers they start to “act up” or become slow or just plain quit working. Our bodies are similar in that they get bombarded with different stresses all day long and adjust in the best way the can but over time “act up” (pain) or “quit” (this is when we have to get a new knee or hip etc.)

We have to remember that our bodies all have a natural design and blue print. If we show the body how it used to function it will remember and be much happier once our “ideal posture” has been approximated.