Psychedelic Posture Therapy Starts without Psychedelics - An excerpt from chapter 2

From Chapter 2: Introduction to Posture Therapy

I know you’re probably anxious to get to the juicy bits of this book about psychedelics. While I assure you that psychedelic discussion makes up well over a third of this book, it’s impossible to understand the Posturedelic Hypothesis without a good understanding of posture therapy. So in this chapter you’ll learn what good posture really means, why poor posture happens, and how posture therapy causes good posture.

Rather than beginning with a definition of good posture, it can be more illuminating to start with what it isn't.

Good posture is often misconceived as maintaining a rigidly upright position like a robot, but this is overly simplistic. Nor is it the ability to walk while balancing a book on your head. These days, there is no shortage of ergonomic aids and corrective devices claiming that you need their product to sit or stand with good posture. 

However, truly perfect posture is simply a natural consequence of the human body enjoying unrestricted, pain-free mobility across all joints. Progress toward this state of being is achievable at any age through posture therapy.

. . .

In essence, improved alignment naturally accompanies an uncompromised range of motion. When I see a person with excellent posture, I can be relatively certain that they’re not going to have any major disruptions to their overall range of motion, barring some recent, invisible injury or illness. When I see a person with posture deviations, I can be certain that I’ll find dysfunctions and compensations causing those deviations.

So, when we discuss analyzing static posture, it implies a secondary analysis of a dynamic range of motion, called functional testing. Posture analysis shows me the deviations. Functional testing allows me to start untangling that web and learn more about which joints are dysfunctional and which are compensating. We’ll discuss posture analysis and functional testing in Chapters Three and Four, respectively. 

. . .

The Case for Posture Causing Pain

Join me for a short thought experiment. Assuming you can put your arm over your head into full shoulder flexion, imagine holding a 10-pound bowling ball directly over your right shoulder. While you may be unable to do this for hours on end, it’s a relatively easy task for a few minutes, assuming you weren’t in pain before you started.

So long as the ball is balanced directly over the shoulder and the elbow is not bent, the ball’s weight aligns with your center of gravity as viewed from the side. The design of the body and how it interacts with gravity makes it relatively easy to bear that amount of weight in that specific position.

Now, imagine moving the ball three to four inches forward from that position by reducing the degree of shoulder flexion. Suddenly, that ball is not aligned with your center of gravity. The ball's weight places a calculable amount of torque on your shoulder joint, which must be resisted to keep the ball stationary. That torque gets handled not just by the shoulder, however. The upper spine rotates, and the relative elevation of the left and right shoulder girdles may change to provide more support, contributing to the lateral flexion of the spine. The rotation and lateral flexion through the spine make the lower spine and pelvis rotate to handle the upper body changes. Keep holding the ball there long enough, and you’ll likely take a small step forward and out with one leg, widening your stance in two dimensions for the hips, knees, and ankles to help bear this asymmetrical load. All these movements compensate for the inability of your arm and shoulder to bear that load alone.

These compensations allow you to hold the ball there longer. Would you imagine that maintaining this pose for an extended period might cause severe fatigue and even pain? And even further, that this pain might extend beyond your shoulder to many of the muscles and soft tissues across the rest of the body having to work extra hard because the shoulder has failed at doing its job? 

This thought experiment is designed to demonstrate how posture deviations can affect your body throughout extended periods of time. The average human head weighs about the same as a bowling ball, and the mathematics of holding your head 3 inches forward of your center of gravity are analogous, but now your spine is the lever instead of your arm. 

Is it reasonable to believe that having your head out of alignment with your center of gravity for years on end causes less of an effect on your body than holding a bowling ball out of alignment?

The soft tissues such as muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage that hold the musculoskeletal system together eventually experience undue stress. This unnecessary stress leaves soft tissue either in pain, vulnerable to injury, or both. Pain and injury beget less motion. Less motion produces further dysfunction and compensation patterns, and so on, in a vicious cycle.

. . .

Why Not Just Hit the Gym?

You might wonder if spending more time at the gym is the solution. While exercise is undoubtedly beneficial for overall health, it's unlikely to be a panacea for poor posture. For someone with already good posture who is meticulous about using proper form, the type of activities available in the gym can be great for maintaining that good posture. But for someone who already has numerous compensations preventing proper function, standard gym activities are more likely to exacerbate poor posture than to correct it systematically.

So, why doesn't most exercise directly improve posture? The crux of the matter is that once compensational movement patterns become deeply ingrained in the musculoskeletal system, nervous system, and brain, they can’t be reversed without concerted effort. Increasing activity alone is insufficient, as strengthening dysfunctional movement patterns mostly reinforces the compensations. It's essential to clarify that I’m not suggesting that exercise, whether at the gym or otherwise, is unhealthy. 

In the next section, we'll dive deeper into why this reinforcement happens. But if the gym isn’t the ideal solution, what is? As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, this is where posture therapy comes into play.

What’s the Remedy?

Reversing these dysfunctional and compensational patterns requires a deliberate approach. 

. . .

So, it becomes a puzzle: dysfunctional parts need exercise to regain their optimal functionality, but the compensations impede their progress.

Breaking the Catch-22

The solution? Posture therapists call it “locking out the compensation.”

…