Posture & Gravity - Random Thoughts

Gravity is always there! I know that is not a profound thought but when I read that a particular exercise is really good for athletes but it won?t work with the geriatric patient or the average person. I get really confused by those kinds of statements. Is gravity turned off for the normal person? No way, gravity is always there and it always wins. I guess I really shook up some people with my article on posture in one of the recent Training and Conditioning magazines. Much of our posture and subsequent deviations is our reaction to gravity. There will be deviations, posture is not static. Posture must be assessed in movement not in stillness. We are designed to move, not stand posed in front of a posture grid! Each sport, each job, and for that matter each life situation will have adaptive postures. The current trend (which is not actually new, but if you listen to the guru crew you would think they discovered postural evaluation) is to evaluate posture statically, identify deviations from ?Normal? (by the way someday I want to meet Mr. Normal) and then correct the deviations. All is fine and well, but what happens when you spend a whole bunch of time working on the corrections without much change happening in quality of movement. Assess posture in movement, look for individual movement signatures; everyone has them, see if anything stands out. Determine if anything that stands out will hinder their ability to move. If you think it will, design a series of remedial exercises to address those needs. Make they part of daily preparation to train. Keep it simple and get them moving.

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Vern Gambetta

Director at Gambetta Sports Training Systems

Vern is the Director of Gambetta Sports Training Systems. He has been the a conditioning coach for several MLS teams as well as the conditioning consultant to the US Men's World Cup Soccer team. Vern is the former Director of Conditioning for the Chicago White Sox and New York Mets. He has lectured and conducted clinics in Canada, Japan, Australia and Europe and has authored six books and over one hundred articles related to coaching and sport performance in a variety of sports. He has a BA in teaching with a coaching minor and an MA in Education with an emphasis in physical education from Stanford University.