Postural Analysis And Massage

Postural analysis is an important accompaniment to massage. It helps identify the imbalances in your body that lead to your aches, pains and strains in the first place. Massage is an excellent tool for treating them. But if the initial cause is not identified and corrected they could continue to return. Postural analysis can also identify issues before they have a chance to develop into pain or injury.

What Is Postural Analysis

Bodies come in numerous shapes and sizes but the human skeleton has an optimum position for different movements. Whether this is standing, sitting, running or bending down to pick something up off the floor. Unfortunately, sitting in a comfortable chair might seem harmless, but comfort doesn’t necessarily mean good for you. Likewise, standing can seem like a preferable alternative. But if not done with good posture it is probably going to result in some muscles doing more work than they were designed for. Even a minor injury several years earlier can result in an equally minor postural change. Over time, this can cause significant pain or further injury elsewhere in your body.

How Postural Analysis Can Help

Postural analysis is a quick and simple process is used to find areas of your body that are out of alignment. This helps your massage therapist to diagnose problems and the best way to use massage to solve them. It involves looking at someone standing in their normal position from all sides and identifying body imbalances. While some of these can be obvious, some are more subtle and require experience to pick up on. Especially as the problems they cause can be well away from the postural issue.

For example, sitting with a poor posture can cause the pelvis to tilt forwards. This can lead to lower back pain and the connection here is obvious. Less obvious is that this is known as lower cross syndrome₍₁₎ and can cause the spine to lose its familiar S shape. This thrusts head and chin forwards, which is known as upper cross syndrome. The source of problems such as neck pain and headaches can originally be from poor position of the pelvis when sitting down.

Another example is knee pain which could actually come from tightness in your glute (bum) muscles. This can cause your leg to turn outwards when walking or running, eventually causing pain in your shin or foot.

Summary

Postural analysis can show the source of a problem rather than treating the symptoms, before the massage even begins. This allows the targeting of one area to give beneficial effects on several others. This can reduce the amount of massages required and enhance the benefits of each one.

Book A Mobile Massage

If you would like to book a mobile massage in York please contact me on 07713 250352 or email david@massageinyork.co.uk. Includes sports massage, deep tissue massage and Swedish massage. For more information on booking click here