Walk Yourself to Better Posture
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Are you ready to hit the ground walking?
I'm just back from a fabulous and intense 6-days of continuing education on feet and walking gait in Santa Cruz, CA. I typically work with everyone on walking to some extent, but I'm now making it an more integral part of my teaching as it's even clearer to me just how much how you walk affects your posture. How you sit and stand affects how you move and how you move also affects how you sit and stand.
When I ask new clients when they are most aware of the changes they are making with their posture, one of the most common replies is, "When I'm walking...", usually because they're not distracted by work. Let's make that productive walking time (in terms of your posture) even more productive.
Spending some time being a student again last week was great and here were my big takeaways....My toes can make more contact with the ground and my left hip can move more when I walk. (And wow, does that feel great!) Yes, your big toe can be a big deal...but you might not notice that the toe is fully kissing the floor until you actually feel it doing so. Why? Because we adapt to our habits and what we get used to feels normal until we have a contrasting experience.
Metaphor for habit (referencing the photo above): If the lighthouse is tilted and I'm tilted too, I'll probably never notice that the lighthouse is tilted. It will look straight from my perspective unless my perspective changes. What does that mean? Start to change your posture and change your walking and you'll notice that it feels different from how you usually do it, which will open the door for CHANGE.
You can get started now. Start by just noticing where you feel the most pressure on your feet when you stand. Is it on the heels or the balls of the feet? More on one foot than the other? On the inner or outer edges? The more information you observe about yourself, the more ready you'll be to improve your posture and you'll have a baseline from which to observe contrast and improvement.
