Posture Brace Pro

Posture Brace

Who Else Wants to Improve their Posture to Better their Physical Appearance, Build a Healthy Strong Back and in turn Prevent Spinal Degeneration and Nerve Root Injuries? 

At Last! You can truely learn how to carry your spine in proper alignment with the aid of a posture brace to target those problem areas that are giving you muscle strain.

If you find yourself suffering from back or neck pain after a day at work or are trying to rebuild your back from a new or old injury, learning to correct your posture is an important part of physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

It is most important for every layperson to become educated in Musculoskeletal Disorders and how to prevent them when they are young. Personally I wish I had this knowledge when I was in my early twenties because at the age of 26 I developed a "silent" injury in my lower back that developed into debilitating pain and weakness on and off for over a year.

It is a most frustrating experience to have a back injury and go through different treatments over months to finally find what works. This is why proper diagnosis is important from the start, and a lot of the time doctors can give you the wrong diagnosis if they are not thorough enough.

Musculoskeletal Injury From Poor Posture

A Musculoskeletal Disorder or Injury is any injury involving the muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments, or nerves of the spine or any other part of the body. The injury can range from a discomfort, minor aches and pains, or a more serious medical condition like an entraped nerve root by a bluging disc in the spine like I had.

Most Musculoskeletal Disorders, especially those of the spine, are recognized to be as a result of an accumilation or combination of generally five things:

1. Poor Posture
2. Faulty body mechanics
3. Stressful living and working conditions
4. Loss of flexibility
5. Decline in general level of physical fitness 

This basically mean that old age is not the real cause of back pain and ostioarthritis, it is a person's lifestyle. Better your lifestyle and you will age gracefully.

"Better your lifestyle and you will age gracefully"

Months and years may pass before this poor lifestyle or body habits actually result in a spinal disorder. The problem develops over time due to one's lifestyle long before an acute episode happens.

So what is a healthy lifestyle? What to do to get a lasting cure?... Basic education on spinal anatamy and restoration of normal posture, strength, flexability and fitness.

Should I Use A Posture Brace?

The one fear of using a posture brace, and it is only one, is the potential to weaken your muscles if used improperly. The easy solution to this is to engage your muscles. Your posture brace is not there to do all the work for you, its purpose is to remind you to maintain proper posture throughout the day on your own by gently pulling you when you go out of alignment. Over time the goal is to build the strength of your postural muscles and habituate them to comfortably keep you always in alignment.

It is important to correct forward head posture and hunched over shoulders because this puts too much stress on the spine in one direction and sets you off balance and creates uneven weight distribution. Chronic forward head posture casuses a strain on the ligaments and muscles in the upper back and cervical (neck) spine. The symptoms can be generalized, non-specific pain in the neck and upper bakc, headaches and occasional referred pain into the arms.

"A posture brace will right away begin to teach you to roll your shoulders back and make it uncomfortable to hunch over so in turn, you will make the effort to sit straight." 

When the head is held in the forward head positon for hours at work or at home when working on the computer or when using a smart phone, there is a considerable amount of weight and tension ut on the base of the neck. Normally, the spine should act as a weight bearing column and simply transfer the weight of the head to the base of the cervical spine, but with forward head posture the head becomes a heavier burden to the upper back as shown in the image below.

Over time this bad habit abnormally shortens the muscle and tendons infront of the spine and lengthens the ones in the back and as a result, proper posture is hard to assume and actually feels awkward to maintain naturally. A posture brace will right away begin to teach you to roll your shoulders back and make it uncomfortable to hunch over so in turn, you will make the effort to sit straight.

How to Improve Posture

Improving your posture is imortant for prevention and, in the case of injury, rehabilitation. There are different ways of improving posture and all of these should be learned and practiced as then work together as a whole to make your back stronger. 

The first and easiest of these is to wear a posture brace on occasion especially when at work or doing activities that cause you to lose proper spinal alignment. The second easiest is taking time to walk and generally be more active throughout each day as this will improve your circulation and hydrate your joints and intervertebral discs. The third is simple posture training stretches along with overall body stretching to regain flexability. Finally the fourth important aspect that should not be overlooked is strengthening your postural muscles. 

We will examin each of these aspects in full with simple directions for you to follow in the associated pages.