Most people accept that sickness and physical deterioration are unavoidable parts of life. But we don’t recognize or maybe we even refuse to look at a basic health fact: Our thoughts, attitudes, emotions and beliefs create health or sickness, enduring youth or old age. And all of these reflect in our posture, regal or not and vice versa.
Correcting bad posture to healthy posture supports your very possible quality longevity.
People like Dan Buettner, National Geographic Fellow and New York Times bestselling author have proven that healthy longevity is possible.
Buettner’s coined the phrase Blue Zone to describe any area of the world where people live far longer than average. The phrase Blue Zone first appeared in Buettner’s November 2005 National Geographic magazine cover story, The Secrets of a Long Life.
If we don’t live in a Blue Zone we can still mimic many of the practices of the Blue Zone people. We can create lifestyle strategies for ourselves that we practice not just from time to time but everyday.
This is how we can ensure a wonderful quality of life, often running circles around people decades younger.
The first strategy excerpted here from our e-book, the Art of Ageless Beauty, focuses on our physical structure. It involves the skeletal system, musculature, and connective tissues that form a healthy posture.
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Adapt the long tall corrective or healthy posture.
A long tall standing posture makes us not only look but feel beautiful and confident and grounded in our bodies.
You want to aim for a neutral, upright spine that’s not flexed either too far forward or backward.
In a body with an excellent healthy posture, the organs all have enough space to function.
Compression caused by poor posture causes organs to function in less space. When compressed, your organs don’t function quite as well. You need to get about the business of correcting bad posture for your health.
Poor posture can cause many conditions:
back, neck, shoulder pain; even headaches and jaw pain
poor blood circulation
impaired lung function
poor digestion
constricted nerves
misaligned or curved spine
stress incontinence (when you leak a little urine if you laugh or cough).
You might think only a weakening body creates physical posture. But you can degrade a previously healthy posture by thought alone.
The body follows thought and emotion. Our blog, The Body Only Understands Emotion discusses this key concept in depth.
Dwell on the inevitability of sickness and death, family worries and drama, or fear of not being able to survive and your posture will probably slump. Feel hopeless, dread, anxiety, depression, or sadness and it will reflect in your physiology and your previously healthy posture.
Thought and the emotions that come from thought affect physical health and structure. They can shift our stance of a previously healthy posture to a new focus of how to correct posture problems.
Seniors tend to feel fear the older they get. This prevailing emotion works against a healthy posture.
According to traditional Chinese medicine, people past the age of 60 enter the Water element phase of life. The principle emotion of Water is fear.
As many people grow older, their end of life rather than their contributions to it takes center stage in their minds. They become out-of-balance in the Water element and with the emotion of fear.
We must always strive for emotional balance for the best most healthy posture and ensuing health possible.
By embracing one or both of the Water element’s archetypes we can remarkably lessen how fearful we feel. We’ll begin leaning into life once again instead of leaning away from it with a backwards posture.
This backwards leaning posture demonstrates a fear of walking into what’s ahead.
The positive archetypes of the Water element are:
the Sage/Philosopher and the Curious Child.
Both Sage and Curious Child move with a slower rhythm. They take their time. They have patience. Hurry doesn’t enter their consciousness. Calm is evident in their manner of speaking and speech, gait, breathing, healthy posture and natural response to life.
Learn more about these archetypes in our blog, The Water Type Personality According to Traditional Chinese Medicine: Understanding Your Archetype for Harmony and Balance.
Incredibly fearful or maybe just plain exhausted with life, some people trudge the rest of their lives with a physical and mental posture of holding back. Rather than living actively, joyfully and by their design in the way of the balanced Water archetypes, they give up and give in.
People who live in joy and appreciation are open, expansive and their healthy postures are tall and upright.
Those who live in fear, downtrodden and full of worry pull physically inward. They become closed. So much fear affects the body badly.
The body responds to fear on a hormonal level, has difficulty accepting nutrients, becomes weaker and starts shutting down on many levels. And it’s all also reflected in the bent or hunched over posture.
Such people, most often seniors, are in serious need of corrective posture techniques (described below).
Just about the best posture corrector for seniors is the emotional support called happiness.
So we see that our emotional state is just as important as our physical health. Our emotions and physical function work in a symbiotic cipher of energy. One feeds the other and back again.
One way to uplift and help balance emotion is to create a robust practice of appreciation and high minded thinking. This daily practice can help lead to happiness.
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If you’re feeling joyless or maybe over-the-top joyful, bring it in to balance with the Fire line.
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For people engulfed in worry and regret, sample products from the Metal line.
Bring fear and agitation to balance with Water element skincare.
When we feel negative emotions our shoulders slump. But when we feel happy our physiology naturally perks up. It straightens because we feel more energetic and alive.
In our blog, A Theory of Happiness: We Probably Can’t Be Totally Healthy and Well Without It, we said:
We can learn what makes us happy and how to get there more of the time… Happiness is what reinforces our innate sense of our true self. It is when life brings to our experience people, things, places, and conditions that resonate with us on a deeper level—the level where we feel peace, inner joy, and happiness. Happiness is also felt when the mind is at rest and free of worrying thoughts.
There are some physical factors that negatively affect healthy posture but there’s a posture corrector for seniors that involves diet.
Two major factors contribute to poor posture in older age: osteoporosis and osteomalacia.
Osteoporosis is the loss of bone mass. Osteomalacia is the softening of the bones.
Over time, bones tend to lose some of their minerals and become less dense (a condition called osteopenia in the early stages and osteoporosis in the later stages).
Older adults often lose height because of osteoporosis when bones become weak and fracture.
Older adults also can lose lean muscle mass while gaining fat. We call this condition sarcopenia. It too causes weakness, frailty and loss of height.
You can help prevent height and stature loss by consuming a consistently healthy diet and staying physically active. Both diet and physical activity help prevent bone loss.
Diet directly impacts bone health. If you don’t get enough nutrients important to bone you increase your risk for bone loss and osteoporosis.
Bone formation requires an adequate and constant supply of nutrients: calcium, protein, magnesium, phosphorus, vitamin D, potassium, and fluoride.
There are also a number of vitamins and minerals needed for bone formation: manganese, copper, boron, iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin K, vitamin C, and the B vitamins.
Women more than men develop hunchback or age-related postural hyperkyphosis. Hyperkyphosis impairs mobility and increases the risk of falls and fractures associated with older age.
Experts haven’t established all the exact causes of hyperkyphosis but they do believe it generally develops from one of two conditions:
muscle weakness and degenerative disc disease (causing vertebral fractures and worsening hyperkyphosis), or
vertebral fractures that occur first in the spine and then precipitate development of a hunched over back.
The best posture corrector for seniors is to proactively prevent bone loss and the need for corrective posture techniques.
Don’t want to wait to take action until you start suffering bone loss and poor posture. Even if you’re well below senior age, healthy diet and sensible exercise will keep you feeling strong with a tall healthy posture all the way into your future.
But as soon as you notice your posture’s degrading, no matter what age that is, aggressively work to mitigate, even reverse it.
Eat lots of dark leafy greens to enrich bone density and improve your health. Be sure you get enough vitamins and minerals in your food.
It’s best to get your nutrients from food. Make supplementation a secondary option if you can’t get all the nutrition you need from food.
Like diet, simple exercise like walking will also not only strengthen your musculature but nourish your skeletal system as well. It can help return you to a regal healthy posture.
Include a weight resistance exercise program and a regimen of stretching exercises (or yoga).
If correcting bad posture is important to you, you absolutely need a set of strong abdominal muscles. It’s your abdominals that hold your body up tall and strong and not your bones.
Abdominal strengthening is the best posture corrector for seniors.
Make a good set of core-strengthening exercises the foundation of your exercise program. What you're really after is developing the abdominals underneath the surface abdominals. These are called the transverse abdominis.
Often, just getting in to the gym consistently improves your self-image so much your posture naturally straightens and rises.
A great benefit of weight resistance is that it’s also very grounding. It will make you feel like you’re fully in your body. You’ll feel more substantial, agile and stable. With a renewed regal healthy posture you’ll rarely fall, if ever, and nearly eliminate your risk of bone fracture from falling.
Give your spine specific flexibility exercises while you also develop flexibility over your entire body. The more flexible the spine is and stronger your core, the more regal and healthy posture. Many gyms offer equipment to help improve spinal flexibility and strength.
Create an all around healthy posture improvement program. Blend a sensible yoga or stretching practice with weight resistance workouts, nutrition, appreciation, balanced emotion and high minded thinking.
Here’s an ultra simple yet powerful technique to achieve not just a healthy posture but a corrective posture.
Direct your awareness to your center chest.
Imagine a string pulling straight upward from your heart area.
Let the upward pulling string lift your chest and encourage your taller straighter posture.
Practice this healthy posture often.
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Sources:
Katzman, Wendy B, et al. “Age-Related Hyperkyphosis: Its Causes, Consequences, and Management.” The Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, U.S. National Library of Medicine, June 2010, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907357/
Zamon, Rebecca. “Want To Improve Your Posture? Walk Around Barefoot.” HuffPost Canada, HuffPost Canada, 23 Nov. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/23/barefoot-walking-benefits_n_8629098.html
Palacios, Cristina. “The Role of Nutrients in Bone Health, from A to Z.” Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17092827.
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