What is Postural Restoration™️

Postural Restoration™️ (PRI) is a revolutionary way of addressing patterned pain, tension and dysfunction in the body by integrating knowledge of how the body works across disciplines of science. PRI brings together research from physics, orthopedics, cybernetics, psychology, physiology, dentistry, respiratory science, pediatrics, speech therapy, optometry and neuroplasticity amongst others, to identify common patterns in human movement and function and create a cohesive and holistic understanding of the subjective and objective ways in which pain or dysfunction occurs - and how to change it.

Standing upright on two legs is a really complicated task - it took us several years to figure out as children with any level of success. Being bipedal requires the processing of a complicated interplay of sense (stretch in muscles, joints & ligaments, pressure in feet and joints and core), activation (using muscles to stabilise, create or absorb forces), resonance (vibrations of the pelvic floor, diaphragm, vocal cords) and spatial awareness (integrating vision, sound, balance, gravity, airflow).
To top it off all these processes need to be exquisitely timed with each other AND adaptable to changes in ground stability, head position, direction of movement and focus on tasks - like catching a ball.

Postural Restoration™️ is a system to assess and treat the integration of all these systems and bring them back to optimal function. A PRI program is a progression of a series of sensorimotor techniques that each create a specific experience of sense, motor control (movement/stability) and left/right sided body & brain integration to enable optimal processing of the requirements of upright standing. Re-integrating these systems can have life-changing results. These are some of the things that can happen:

• Reduced background tension being held in the body for stability, eradicating chronic back, neck and shoulder tension.
• Optimised breathing eliminates hyperventilation and breathlessness, increases aerobic fitness and progressively reduces symptoms of asthma & bronchitis
• Efficient and appropriately timed use of hip, knee and ankle joints during walking decompresses and nourishes these joints, relieving chronic tightness, soreness and impingements
• Harnessing arm swing and torso rotation effectively during gait reduces compensatory neck tension, improves psychological sense of and trust in self, improves cognition and spatial processing and access to flow states.
• Restoring alternating compression and decompression in the head, jaw and base of skull can permanently relieve chronic tension headaches and migraines, TMJ dysfunction, visual sensitivity and post-concussion symptoms.

See, the dirty little secret is this: There isn't just one posture. There's two. As bipedal animals, humans have two basic ways to organise ourselves against gravity: over the left leg and over the right leg. There's always two. Every second that we're standing up we're either subtly bouncing weight from right to left, or pushing and shifting weight as we step one foot in front of the other. So we have a left-oriented set of postural muscles and a right-oriented set and these muscles work in alternating back-and-forth patterns to give each other a break from the demanding job of resisting gravity. Or, at least they should.

Here's where the problem tends to lie. Humans aren't symmetrical. Different organs are sitting in different places in the abdomen. The liver is on the right, stomach on the left, the intestines are spiralled. Inside the ribcage it's not symmetrical either: the heart mostly sits on the left side, while we have two lobes of the lung on the left and three on the right. All of that and more means that regardless of right- or left-handedness humans have a strong preference for always using the right side of the torso for stability. This means using the right-side postural pattern muscles all the time. Which also means the left-side postural muscles get suppressed.

Okay, so what does this mean really for all of us that are spending our days sitting or standing in discomfort and wanting to do something about it? It means that restoring your posture - fixing your posture - means suppressing the right side a little bit and re-awakening your left side. If you reclaim your body's ability to shift into the left side, you can finally give those right-sided postural muscles the break they've been crying out for and let them turn off

Here's a couple of tips your can try on your own to find your left postural muscles:

• As you're sitting, press the right foot into a surface and shift your left knee behind your right knee, turning the hips to the left
• Reach your left elbow down while sitting with your left hand on the left thigh, compressing the left ribs and breathing into the right ribcage
• Reach your left hand behind your computer screen or notebook, while keeping your left ribs touching the chair behind you
• While standing at your desk, shift your weight to your left leg and left heel by gently pressing into the right inside arch and right big toe
• Reach forwards with your right arm while you exhale completely
• Reach forwards with the left arm while inhaling and opening the right ribs
• Stand with one leg in front of the other, and shift the left hip so it's behind the right hip.

Of course, there's always more complicated possibilities that might be locking someone into a certain pattern and every person is unique in the solutions that they've come up with to stand, sit, work, run, jump and live without leaving a pattern of stability. Sometimes a more in-depth assessment is necessary to help with creating a program to re-integrate the two sides and for that I recommend finding a practitioner that practices a Postural Restoration™️ approach to restoring balance between your sides.

If you live in the Vancouver, Canada area you can book an initial session and Work with Me to discuss what's going on for you and if a Postural Restoration program could help.