Good posture is important. It helps proper spine alignment, improves blood flow, helps keep your nerves and blood vessels healthy, and supports your muscles, ligaments, and tendons. You are less likely to experience back and neck-related pain over time.

When you take a walk or bend to pick up things, you activate your hip flexors. Incidentally, when you have hip flexor pain, even moderate tasks can be an uncomfortable experience. For example, since the pandemic started, a lot of us had caved into the idea of sitting long hours at our desks. We no longer have boundaries and restrictions with our time so we don't notice that we've been sitting for longer than usual. Sitting isn't the problem. It's what you consciously do to break long hours of sitting. Do you stretch? Do you change positions? Do you take a walk?

If the hip flexor is constantly compressed like when we sit for too long, our brain stores that information. Our brain becomes tuned to just that muscle. Other functional surrounding muscles that move shut down and thus we get the wrong movement patterns. There are 58 muscles in the lumbar hip complex alone that make you move your hips, pelvis, and spine. Pain in the back, knees, or neck is often the effect of sitting for long periods without the right neuromuscular stimulation.

When the brain can no longer communicate with all muscles, faulty long-term movement patterns occur thus, chronic pain has formed. After three months of chronic pain, other muscles stop working properly. Its chain effect is called the "joint-to-joint approach."

The focus of my program is on neutral work. Particularly for posture, we do isometric exercises, at least at the start of the program. Before I help you do big movements, the right muscles have to learn how to "show up." The first few months will be about learning routines of simple exercises with little to no movement in them. The main goal is to improve neuromuscular communication.

Once neuromuscular communication in the body improves, I will then teach further routines with more movement. I want to make sure when movement ramps up, the right muscles are doing the right work. Isometric exercises alone don't fix movement pattern problems, but they should be a great place to start. Getting more muscles and joints to move together translates to you feeling better!