Being a Massage Therapist in a very busy city like Calgary for the past 11 years, I have spent many hours deep into the tissues of thousands of clients. Over 15 000 sessions have led to many realizations and understandings about how the body carries tension, how it becomes posturally distorted, and what tends to keep the musculoskeletal system from finding a state of balance that allows for movement free of pain and restriction.

There are a multitude of factors that lead to pain and discomfort. One of the biggest and most managed causes is stress. It affects all of us. We deal with it, adapt to it, and try to avoid it! Stress in all its forms finds its way into our lives from countless sources. I start with stress, because of its compounding affect on everything else. All things contributing to postural stain are only made worse by stress.

The greatest factor affecting peoples predominant posture, which impacts how we move, feel, and cope with everything, is completely tied to habitual postures. Sounds vague? Let me narrow it down to the three habitual patterns which affect your postural reality the most.

Everything you do each day is done sitting, standing, or sleeping!

How you do all three of these things will have the greatest impact on what your postural reality is. Not even the bumps and bruises you receive along the way, the falls and accidents you might have, nor your genetic makeup has as great an impact as the three things you spend the most time doing. There’s barely an hour of the day not spent doing one of those three things! How do you sit? How do you stand? What position do you tend to maintain most while trying to get those 6-8 hours of sleep every night?

Many of my massage therapy clients have office jobs that require them to maintain a seated position anywhere from 4-8 hours every day! This may not appear to be significant, but lets look a little closer. Lets take the lesser of the two and do some basic math: 4 hours a day, 20 hours a week, and 80 hours a month, equals over 900 hours a year holding a seated position. Of course, that’s only at work! There is the time spent seated in the car, on the couch, at the kitchen table, or at the coffee shop. Obviously we could double that 900 hours a year and still not account for all the time spent in this posturally challenging position!

Two major muscle groups are held in a shortened position while you sit. The major hip flexors, the Psoas, and Rectus Femoris, are greatly shortened while seated. The former of the two attaches to the anterior (front) side of your lumbar vertebrae. After spending long periods of time in a shortened position, the Psoas becomes shorter and tighter. The problem with the hip flexors being tight is that they pull the lumbar vertebrae forward. This is a classic reason why many people experience low back pain.

Having your knees bent at 90 degrees, for countless yearly hours of sitting, also tends to lead to incredibly tight hamstrings! No wonder as we age it gets to harder to touch our toes! Sitting is also hardly kind to our neck and shoulders.

People seek massage therapy to address the muscular imbalances developed from sitting daily at their computer. Having their hands in front of them on a keyboard, often with one hand outstretched onto a mouse, while their head progressively lurches forward toward the monitor, leads to structural changes, which for a low impact occupation, have quite the big impact on how we feel.

The second habitual posture we all have our own variation of, is how we stand. It is something rarely given much attention, but all of us have a habitual standing posture. Simply bringing your awareness to your body while standing at any given moment can reveal interesting things about how your muscles have their way with your skeletal structure.

Bring your attention to your feet. How do the look? How are they pointing? Do they seem to be heading in the same direction? Don’t be surprised to find one heading north and the other east! Interestingly, you may notice this as a reoccurring theme every time you quickly glance down and check in with yourself. Often one foot will consistently be in front of the other. You may notice that you shift your weight consistently to one side. These little things reveal big things about your muscles, and how they are maintaining your limbs in consistent postures, or habitual patterns. Massage therapists’ help you to reveal these patterns and focus your treatment on restoring balance in you muscular system to reduce restrictions in your movements and strain to muscles and joints that are being held in weak and vulnerable positions.

Every muscle in our body has an opposite. If one has to contract, its opposite must relax. Our bodies function optimally, when our muscles are balanced in length, strength, and flexibility. When a muscle and its opposite are out of balance, we have less pain-free, fluid, dynamic movement and function.

Massage therapy practitioners help reveal postural distortions and the habitual patterns contributing to these distortions and introduce opposition to the habitual posture. Once you discover the habitual postures and their opposites, it becomes easier to find the balance. It is here where freedom from postural strain can be discovered. Contrary to assumptions, sleep is not always an escape to postural strain.

Have you aver tried switching sides of the bed? Your partner not too interested? Likely you haven’t been too interested either! Why? We are habitual creatures. We move in habitual ways and do habitual things. We also sleep in very habitual patterns. Some people sleep on their stomachs. Their head tends to be rotated and laterally flexed for many hours a night.

Did I mention six to eight hours? So maybe side sleeping is better for the neck? Maybe, but what is happening to your shoulder against the mattress? What are your legs doing? Is the bottom one straight while the top one is bent at the knee and the hip? How will that long held position distort your proper anatomical standing position? The body tends to adapt to its own sense of what normal standing is based on what the body wants to do. It wants to move into the position it spends the most time in. Your every instinct, understanding, and programmed sense of what normal standing is, competes with predominantly held postures. This is perceived as strain.

Massage aims to restore balance to muscles that have been programmed by our habitual postures. Releasing tension and bringing more equilibrium to the muscles and their opposites, gives us a more fluid pain-free range of motion. By moving daily into positions and stretches which oppose your habitual postures, you are encouraging balance. Your Massage Therapist can help you discover your habitual patterns and postures, and their opposites. Somewhere in the middle, you will discover the balance, between our conscious postural desire, and our unconscious habits.