Prevent Falls with Better Posture: How Posture Therapy Helps [Video]

Prevent Falls with Better Posture: How Posture Therapy Helps - Video Summary

Posture alignment therapy is highly effective in reducing the risk of falls by addressing imbalances that affect your center of gravity and muscle coordination. When posture is misaligned, whether from kyphosis, head-forward positions, or uneven hips, it shifts the body’s weight in ways that make catching yourself from a fall more difficult. By improving postural alignment, the therapy restores balance between the muscles, ensuring that the right ones activate when needed.

Misalignment can cause certain muscles to overcompensate, which leads to fatigue and poor coordination. This increases the likelihood of tripping, slipping, or losing balance during everyday activities such as walking, using stairs, or even getting in and out of a car. Through exercises that activate underutilized muscles and correct compensatory patterns, posture therapy enhances both your kinesthetic awareness and proprioception—your body’s ability to sense and correct its position. 

Additionally, aligning the feet and legs is essential for improving how you interact with the ground, as poor foot positioning can interfere with nerve signals that control movement. Posture therapy helps retrain the body to move correctly and prevent falls, especially for older adults or individuals concerned with their balance while walking or performing daily activities. 

Posture alignment therapy not only optimizes your posture but also builds your body’s resilience, helping you stay stable and active.

Prevent Falls with Better Posture: How Posture Therapy Helps - Video Transcript

Hi guys, we have a question from one of our clients and they asked “How can posture alignment therapy reduce the risk of falls?” Yeah, good question. They know it can. They said how, so they know it can. So they're off to a good start. 

Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, we see all kinds of postural issues which relate. And so, I mean, just a simple, from a biomechanical standpoint just thinking of center of gravity. So if somebody is offset to one direction or if they're leaned forward a certain direction. Something like kyphosis even is going to push the weight distribution forward, so now your center of gravity is forward over the ball of the foot.

So that means people are already shifting and maybe stumbling forward. That can lead to falls forward. And one of the big things with risk of falls is just catching yourself, you know being able to stop momentum. 

Yeah. I have a few clients that have come in because they're like, I'm worried about falling. Like I walk my dog and every time I walk my dog, I'm like, I'm always stressed that I'm going to lose my balance or I'm going to fall. Or they're older and that's just a concern for them.  But yeah, exactly. Center of gravity. And you can see with people when the way they're standing, where are they already in that disposition to put them at a higher risk?

Because if I'm standing and if my head is pulled in front – just levers and pulleys – my head is the furthest part from the floor. It's going to have the greatest pull to pulling me towards the floor. So I'm going to have a harder time keeping upright. So it can definitely help. 

Yeah. And with the head position too – looking from the side view – we've all seen those pictures where the head is forward. And for every, I forget how many degrees it is, but for every measure of degrees forward, then it's putting more stress onto the neck and of course, those neck muscles also go to the thoracic spine. So that's a big one. 

And then when we look from the front and back views also, then we can just look at the head position and see if the head tilt is there or if a head is offset or something. Then we know their center of gravity between right and left is off.  And I would say that's a big one for us is the asymmetry between the two sides and people commonly have a dominant side or a non dominant side.

And that usually translates into an elevated hip or a hip pelvic tilt disparity where one hip or one side is tilted more than the other. And then that's changing how the back muscles are working. And so if you again, you have this little shift of equilibrium or changing environments as you're walking or getting in and out of the car or going up and down stairs or a slippery surface or something like that, then the ability to catch yourself from from right and left differences, or just to be able to navigate the different terrain and so forth.

All that becomes off because it's a guessing game. And so, okay, what muscles are going to do this job if they're out of position and unable to work properly? In a normal… let's say you walk on a treadmill all the time. Great. And some people you even see, they're like holding on the whole time, or they're doing an elliptical machine where their feet are grounded the whole time, that's completely different and doesn't challenge the vestibular system, doesn't challenge the kinesthetic proprioceptive system as much as far as balance. And so then when they get into other environments, well, I've been going to the gym. I've been doing exercise. Why isn't it translating?

Well, because we have to actually fix the body going into those activities and have it ready to navigate those spaces, which again comes back to alignment to the muscle balances there. And then it's, okay, now it's at least ready or it's been active previously. So now going into that environment, those muscles are already on versus like, okay, turn on when I need you right now, when I'm falling.

I think besides just weight distribution and muscles the length tension being off, a big piece is proprioception because a lot of clients, say if you have an everted foot or a really supinated pronated foot, your foot strike is, you're not going to hit the floor in the way, in the right way that the proprioceptors turn on your glutes to help extend your leg and you're never going to get a good push off so you're not going to move through space the same so you might not have a real drop foot, but essentially you're going to have this sort of one lame leg just because the nerves aren't getting the right signal to turn on the right muscles.

So it is more just than, oh, am I shifted? Can I really visually see this shift? It could be slight little variations, slight rotations. There's so many things that happen within our body that are automatic and that should be automatic. And just one turned out foot can turn half of those things off.

Yeah. And kind of going along with like the turned out foot, if then I'm thinking about how is the position of the hips? Are the hips tilted forward? Are the femurs turned out? Then that's putting me in a compromised position to even pick my leg up, lift my knee up, flex my hip to catch myself if I'm stumbling forward.

Then I'm kind of turning out, I'm not able to pick my feet up, I'm not actually going to be moving the direction to catch myself if my hip is forward, if my femurs are turned out. So if I'm falling forward, I won't catch myself forward. I'll try to catch myself kind of going sideways if that makes sense. I'm thinking of lines of movement and limits of range of motion.

Yeah, it makes sense to me when I think of everything. It should be a moving structure. If the wheels are forward, we should be rolling forward, but the wheels are turned out. Will I actually catch myself forward?

Yeah, totally. And I think of that and usually we'll explain that to a lot of clients that like those feet turned out, it seems like such a small thing. But those are training wheels, right? Those are trying to keep you laterally stable. But I have a six year old daughter and she was riding a bike. She never, we never used training wheels because she was on one of those pedal-less bikes and then went to the pedals right away and got it because she understood that momentum was her friend.

But she also knew how to stay straight versus all this wobbliness. She's also a little speed demon, but you know, that helps when you're going on a straight line, but the idea with the feet I think that just going back to that, and to Carrie Ann’s point too, with the proprioception is that's what gets ingrained and that's what gets trained.

It's also people where we're all wearing too much shoe. So one of the things that we advise people is to wear less shoe or go barefoot, especially when they're doing their postural exercises and so forth. Because we do want to train, and we're very meticulous about foot position during the exercises because that's where we need to train you.

And then we also need to train all those nerve receptors, the tens of thousands of nerve receptors that are on the bottom of the foot that are supposed to be planting and actually that gripping and grabbing and staying grounded on the floor as we step and as we move. And that just is such a lost thing to much of our society.

I will speak to a little bit.. We touched on the vestibular balance. I have a client who – head tilt was not her issue – she's very tilted. And I always think of her because in every picture I take, I tilt, but that's more of like my personality rather than me walking that way, but she's tilted and she stays that way.

And there were a lot of things going on. She came in for pudendal nerve pain and bladder issues, which is very different from, from balancing. And she wasn't somebody that had a major balance issue. However, actually, when we started to get her hips and everything in alignment, her head started to straighten.

Now she didn't start tripping. It didn't mess up her balance, but what it did mess up is her vision. And she had to change the actual prescription of her glasses, because if you had astigmatism and they were written for her eye to always be higher. And when her head came down, they had to change her prescription.

So it's so interesting how we really are just like a foundation. We're just a pile of rocks and if you move one rock out and everything shifts. It really does change everything. So that is just a we're all connected story, I suppose. 

Yeah, totally. It is a good reminder because the three balance mechanisms that we primarily think of are the visual, which is one. So for a lot of people, that's a simple test we do. Close your eyes and just stand there. There's a lot of people who can't do that, so that's a good test. You could do, if you could just stand there and how much sway do you feel? Hold on to something if you're not used to that.

And then also like a single leg stance where it's like, okay, balance on one leg, holding up the other leg. Can you do that for 10 seconds? Because that’s been shown in studies to relate to longevity. It's a longevity marker. And of course for, as we’re getting older and for older folks over 65, let's say, there's a statistic there where people who fall and break their hip, that break the femur, then the mortality rates are actually high. 

So there's visual and then there's vestibular, which is the inner ear. So that's like, if the head is off, then the fluid that's in those ears, in the ears is actually going to not help us in that sense because it's off. It's like, if you had a level and you're doing carpentry and your bubble was off and it was telling it was level, but everything was at 10 degrees shift.

It's like, well, this house is never going to be straight, right? So it's because the bubble is off. So that's what happens in our inner ear. It's like, that's supposed to be calibrated to level and give us constant feedback on what that is. And then there's also the kinesthetic proprioceptive aspect of it too. So, the three, again, the three balance mechanisms visual, vestibular, and then kinesthetic or proprioceptive sense of awareness.

I have a client and it's so interesting because that's something he was never taught or thought of was his feet. And he's a very active guy, very athletic, goes to the gym. He had stopped running because of the pain in his back and his feet, and he wears shoes all the time. Indoor, he has indoor shoes that he wears all the time, and it was one thing of checking out his posture. I was like, well let me see what your feet look like. And, I don’t know, it's almost like Victorian times, like no one had seen his feet. It was like he took off his shoes and it was just really high arches and feet turned out though. So it's usually you see feet turned out and flat foot, but very high arches. And it was like, when have you last gotten your feet checked?

Do you have support for your feet? When you walk, do you have a high arch support if you need it? Do you ever walk barefoot? And he says, no, when he walks barefoot. his feet hurt a lot. So he always just wears shoes all the time. And now he's at the point where he can actually walk barefoot around the house, and it feels weird to wear shoes indoors.

And he's kind of like, I've never felt these things before. I guess his feet have never really touched the floor. And I was like, yeah, try walking outside on grass or walking on sand and see how that feels. And, It's just interesting how much of his world has been opened, because now he has this sense that he's never really used. Because we have so many nerves and proprioceptors on the bottoms of our feet that we're unaware of. It's suddenly he's like, wow, yeah, I can feel the floor. Like, yeah.

Yeah, that's so awesome.

Struggling with Balance Issues & Want to Prevent Falls?

Take control of your stability and confidence to prevent falls with our personalized posture alignment therapy. Our experts will identify the root cause of your imbalance and help you regain strength and coordination. 

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