I am going to talk about postural and movement habits here.
Who wants to have bad postural and movement habits?
No one.
And how come we all have them?
And on the top of that, most of the time they are the reason our body is in pain.
Follow me on this.
We are training for these habits - they don’t happen all of sudden, they don't come from nowhere.
By the way, what is training? Systematic activity.
Well, if we round our shoulders all the time or we keep our head forward - isn't this systematic activity?
And why do we train - to modify skills.
Well, if we keep our shoulders up with every movement we perform - we train a new skill, and start to create a new habit.
We train - all day, every movement or stationary body position is considered training.
It's so simple to create a new habit:
No extra time needed - WHO has extra time, right?- we do it constantly along with what we already do- we don’t need to stop what we are doing to round our shoulders, they go rounded as we do other stuff
Its very easy - we love easy stuff - we don’t need special training, coach, education, most of the time we are not aware or not realizing how bad habits come when we are not resting, being stressed out, fatigued, in pain, in a rush - we keep moving.
It does not require thinking - who wants overthinking or more thinking - we just keep going and doing movements or stationary body positions the wrong way which eventually become memorized
No effort - it comes without trying, while we are on the go and doing our stuff.
No learning - it comes easy out of comfort.
Day after day repeat, practice unintentionally turns into training our bodies.
Unintentional Consistent Training
Not 2-3 times a week, no every day.
We train 24/7.
This is the reason why we don’t realize how fast we create a bad habit or that we have already created it and put it in action.
So we train:
Unintentionally - we perform movements without thinking, it is our nature, we just move. But because our mind is busy with other things, we have one million things to do all day long, fatigue, stress, overwhelm etc. we don’t think how we reach out or if our shoulders are where they're supposed to be.
Consistently - yes, we are very consistent in training these bad habits. Because once we start modifying different postural elements or a movement, we start doing slowly and gradually all our movements the same wrong way and slowly and gradually this becomes a pattern, gets into a moving chain, interacts with other moving chains and leads to aches, pains, higher risk of injury. Not a good stuff.
Every day, all the time at any time - slowly and gradually this new information gets recorded in the brain and becomes unintentional, normal and we use it without realizing that affects other moving patterns, creates compensation patterns and the bad habits multiply.
Let’s look at an example:
If I sit with rounded shoulders all day long, when I go for a walk I will walk with rounded shoulders unless I intentionally work to bring them back to the normal alignment. Then, I will do the dishes with rounded shoulders and day after day I will end up doing everything with rounded shoulders. And this will be my “normal “. Ok , but it doesn’t stop here.
The body creates compensation mechanisms and patterns to keep us moving and performing as productive as possible, the whole body gets involved and starts modifying other moving patterns to make it for the lack that the first bad habit cause. And day after day, we train more and more bad habits - unintentionally but consistently. And they become our normal way of moving but not only that - when they become normal and the changes are made, we start moving, working out, performing daily tasks based on this wrong information and signals. And we do it until the warning - pain.
When one part changes its position, other parts of the body have to adjust to this and they change until the whole body is changed in order to be upright and function somehow. But this deepens the muscle imbalance, the joints alignment is compromised and the body, no matter how high its potential is to adapt and compensate. However, we all know the body has limits. And when we push to the limits, we get the warning - the pain I was referring to earlier.
Then we realize that our posture is bad, our muscles are tight, and its pretty hard to perform some movements with out pain.
Creating just one bad habit leads to creating other bad ones because of the ability of the body to adjust or compensate.
And the big truth is..
They come very fast but they go away very slow - if its only one - it will be easy to go back to the good one, but as you realize that one leads to a lot more and we end up with pain when we exhaust all the body capabilities to deal with the constant stress on muscles, joints and soft tissues.
And we are facing a long journey to get back to what we have lost - the good habits which keep us in good shape so we can do everything we need and love to do without fear of pain and complications.
Please remember:
If you are wondering why you have a pain - maybe it is a bad habit(s) which led to it.
Do not live with bad habits, do not ignore small details which can lead to big struggles.
It is this simple to be pain free!