“Hey, your baby is not sitting upright!

Would you buy into it?

Of course not.

So why do we have an urge to say to our older children:

“Stand up tall!”

or perhaps we have heard this from our mum and insist on saying it

and are surprised that their posture doesn’t change?

When we ask someone (or ourselves)

to change a habit, we should make sure

they have the conditions and support to make a change and succeed.

A baby is not able to sit upright

until they have gained enough strength in their spine muscles,

we equally cannot change our forward position,

until we have re-trained our spine to stand upright

and have re-wired our brain to know what a good posture really is.

We (and our teens) have been stuck in a forward position for years,

our whole life is “forward” biased:

staring at our phones, sitting at our desk for many hours

even our “movement” time is forward:

walking, cleaning, gardening etc

It’s true that when we stand upright and align our bones well,

there would be much less effort on our body and less strain on our joints,

but our body cannot change simply by getting reminders.

When our body (and brain!) have gone through Pilates training,

and learnt what a good alignment is,

we would no longer need external reminders.

We would just “know” that our used to be “natural position”

is as a matter of fact – painful for our body.

If our poor posture feels “natural”, it doesn’t mean it’s beneficial for us,

It just means that we have been stuck in that position for a long time.

Once our body has gone through Pilates training,

it can endure longer periods of standing, sitting

and even cooking, cleaning, waiting

in which it will remain long, tall, graceful and pain free.

It’s not our fault.

It’s our inevitable sedentary lifestyle

No matter how old we are

or how long we have not been training for,

with a focused, professional training,

our hunched forward, rounded shoulders and forward head position

can be changed.

Yes, we would need to invest in learning how to move better

and become more mindful about how we move and how it feels,

what parts in our body we should keep stable and which ones should move

but that’s exactly how we maintain a long, strong, lean and pain free body

for life.

There is no other way.

Keep training intelligently,

Liron Kass

PS

Tom is 5 years old today, and he’s learnt to sit up a long time ago,

he’s been practising consistently so he got there and no reminders were required