How is our posture determined?

Your posture is an accumulation of everything you have ever done, felt and experienced. Each person’s structure is completely unique, many have similarities but none are identical.

Your body and your mind adapt to cope with the experiences of life. When you sprain your ankle it is likely to swell in order to protect the joint. Once the swelling disappears adhesions and inflexibility may remain causing you to use the joint differently. The body will choose the path of least resistance and will dissipate the lack of function by spreading it throughout the body. This results in a shift of the whole body.

The connective tissue responds to this change in function by thickening, shortening and binding itself to other structures to help give it support. This results in loss of function, stiffness and lack of mobility. This can manifest itself to the person as pain, lack of energy or a feeling of being off balance making movement effortful.

In generations past humans were more susceptible to patterns of strain due to physical labour but today we have very different postural patterns due to the way we lead our daily lives. The advent of cars and computers has changed the performance of our bodies enormously, subsequently the postural patterns we now see are different.

As well as physical experiences our body’s structure can also be defined by the experiences of the person in the body. Emotional trauma, perception of the self, and perception of your environment can also present themselves as structural patterns. This relationship is however unlikely to be a ‘one way system’, structural patterns can also influence your mental state Silverman (1973)  Norman Beckett (1974).

SI seeks to change structural patterns by way of manipulation of the connective tissue, the body is an radically changeable unit and is always changing.