Posture, gravity and learning

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Children and adults dealing with learning disabilities are often managed regardless of how functional their physical bodies are.

Children and adults dealing with learning disabilities are often managed regardless of how functional their physical bodies are. We tend to be brain based in our approach to resolving learning disabilities. In some cases, we resort to medication.

A question rarely brought up is the following: before learning, physically, what must be managed by both kids and adults alike? The answer is gravity.

Managing the weight of gravity upon the body supposes that connectivity mechanisms between the brain and the muscles are indeed intact. Yet, that being said, the very demand on the body to resist gravity activates areas of the brain that are essential for cognitive processes to be developed naturally and to function optimally.
Clinically, what I have witnessed is that when the body is aligned and stable, it resists gravity more efficiently, leading to activation of key brain areas needed to learn… anything.

So, reversely, what happens when there is no gravity to be managed? What about astronauts? Researchers in 1999 assessed the results of 29 studies on the topic. 6 cognitive measures were looked at. They are response time, memory, reasoning, pattern recognition, fine motor skills and dual-task performance.

The conclusion was that several cognitive performance measures do appear to be affected in space.

Moral of the story: gravity turns on the brain, which helps with cognitive tasks. Resisting gravity more efficiently, with a balanced body contributes to lighting up more brain areas equally, leading to a more powerful brain! If the body is misaligned and imbalanced, fighting gravity is inefficient and the brain is not activated to its full potential.

The solution: it’s called posturology.

Is your posture making you sick?

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Patients of mine rarely walk into the office with their main reason for consultation being high blood pressure, for example. But low and behold, could it be that their posture is partially at fault?

Do you know how much it costs to stand upright all day? I am not too sure anyone knows. What we do know is that a cost, there is. Researchers, in 1978, addressed this very question.

What they found was that standing upright was linked to increased heart rate and blood pressure. It makes sense, considering that it’s an effort to resist the pull of gravity.

In a state where imbalances are easy to identify, the body has to work harder than it should to do just about anything since all activities on Earth are performed under gravity (minus swimming).

Moral of the story: if you present with postural imbalances, your heart and circulation system may be working too hard to keep you going!

Solution: it’s called posturology!

Back pain and posture

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Too often, I am exposed to theories as to why individuals are suffering with low back pain, especially when it has become chronic. I often hear about specific muscles being inhibited or certain joints being stiff. To me, this is a great example of addressing the issue by looking at the small picture.

When looking at the big picture, we address the body as a whole and we look for postural imbalances and how stable the body is in space. This is what I’ve seen work best for individuals to actually get rid of chronic ailments. This is what a few researchers did in their study entitled Postural control in individuals with and without non-specific chronic low back pain: a preliminary case-control study.

What is discussed here is that chronic low back pain (cLBP) affects 12-33% of the adult population. In total, 44 individuals were tested. 21 of them had cLBP and 23 did not. What came out of this study is quite clear! Patients suffering from cLBP had postural deficits and were unstable when their eyes were closed while standing on unstable surfaces.

Moral of the story: if you present with postural imbalances and are unstable, you are more likely to have cLBP.

Solution: it’s called posturology!