Muscles and the Postural Flute
Somatic Anatomy
By Mary Ann Foster
Originally published in Massage & Bodywork magazine, October/November 2006. Copyright 2006. Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. All rights reserved.
Most massage therapists know the havoc poor posture can wreak on the body. It bends and stresses the joints, locks major muscles in chronic contractions, restricts movement and causes pain, and gradually wears the musculoskeletal system down. Postural dysfunctions can even result in injury, which occurs suddenly when the smallest turn or twist snaps the weakest link. In addition to all this, poor posture simply looks and feels bad.
On an emotional level, posture is attitude. Postural patterns often begin as protective cloaks we wear to guard against emotional pain, which manifests both physically and psychologically. After all, it is hard to stand tall when you're feeling depressed, and it's hard to feel down when you're standing tall.
On a mechanical level, posture is more than a position. It is the dynamic balancing act of a group of postural muscles working together to keep our slightly swaying bodies upright. In this regard, posture is an inside job. Only you can change your posture because only you can control your muscle patterns. And if you can feel these changes in yourself, you'll be better at helping your clients do the same.
Most of us have an idea what good posture is, but how to achieve it is the issue. A common yet misguided correction is to straighten the spine and hold it there. Yet when the muscles tire, the trunk slowly sinks into an all-too-familiar, unsightly slump. In this article we'll look at these dynamics, exploring muscle function through the postural lens.
The Postural Flute
Our postural muscles work together toward a single goal: to keep our bodies upright. Far less muscular effort is needed to support a vertical spine oriented along gravity's pull than to maintain a horizontal spine suspended between four legs. Because the postural muscles work together to support a single axis, the human stance is the most efficient of any animal.
The drawback of this incredible efficiency is that if any one muscle along the chain of support fails to function, the economy of the whole system declines in reverse proportion. For example, a forward head creates muscular compensations (read: excessive contraction) throughout the body.
One can activate the postural muscles like the notes on a flute, harmony lies in the balance of tone among the notes (see Figure 1). The key to effective postural education is determining which muscles along the flute are not working, then activating them.1
Contract and Relax
The first step in changing body patterns is awareness, or sensing the muscles as they work. A muscle cell is limited to two functions: contraction and relaxation. The smallest contractile unit of a muscle is a motor unit--a motor nerve plus all the muscle cells it innervates. A single muscle has anywhere from fifty to thousands of motor units, the muscle's resting tone is determined by the number of motor units firing when the body is relaxed.
Muscle relaxation is a graded process. Total relaxation is impossible. If all your muscles were to relax right now, your body would collapse. Lucky for us, the skeletal muscles work reflexively (see Figure 2, page 78). Some motor units are always working, even when we sleep. When we are up, all of our postural muscles should be on to support us.
Exercise 1. Contract and Relax
The first step in training a postural muscle is being able to distinguish between contraction and relaxation.
- Begin sitting or standing in a comfortable, upright position. Place your hands on your lower abdomen, right above your pubic bone (see Exercise 1). Let your abdominal muscles completely relax and hang out.
- Slowly contract the perineal muscles between your sit bones, as though you had to go to the restroom and were holding it. Did the tone change in your lower abdomen? The muscles should tighten right above the pubic bone because the perineum co-contracts with the transversus abdominis muscles.
- Relax the perineum. Practice slowly contracting and relaxing until you can feel the difference.
Adaptation and Habit
Skeletal muscles are highly adaptable and can change in an instant. They can melt under skilled hands or seize up at a mere hint of danger. Muscles are also creatures of habit. Muscular habits show up in an individual's unique stance and style of movement. When we recognize a friend at a distance by his distinct strut, we are registering the familiar shape of his habitual patterns.
Muscles quickly habituate to how we use them because once neuromuscular pathways are established, nerve impulses like to travel along these familiar routes. Worn neuromuscular pathways are like ruts in the road: unless we consciously steer away from them, they are easy to fall into. For example, after twenty-five years of driving a standard car, I now drive an automatic. But when I'm tired or distracted, my foot still pushes for the clutch as though it had a mind of its own! Intentional movement is the key to breaking muscular habits.
Exercise 2. Transversus Abdominis and Diaphragmatic Breathing
Intentional diaphragmatic breathing is crucial to balancing vertical tone among the "notes," or muscles, of the postural flute.
- The lateral expansion of the lower ribs is the hallmark of diaphragmatic breathing. To feel this, place your hands over each side of your lower ribs. Close your eyes and breathe easy.
- On each inhalation, expand your lower ribs into your hands (see Exercise 2). Continue to breathe like this until it feels comfortable. If you're not a diaphragmatic breather, it will be difficult and may take months of practice to repattern.
- Now allow your abdominal muscles to relax and distend your belly. Take several breaths, expanding your lower ribs on each inhalation. Distending the belly usually restricts diaphragmatic breathing.
- Relax. Next, put your hands on each side of your lower abdominal wall. Slowly and lightly contract the transversus abdominis muscle, drawing your lower abdominal muscles back toward your sacrum. Use minimal effort and hold.
- As you lightly hold your lower abdominals, return to breathing into your lower ribs. This should feel easier than the diaphragmatic breathing you did in step 3, when your belly was distended. Lightly contracting the transversus abdominis contains the viscera and keeps the diaphragm from bottoming out, so expansion from inhaling spreads along the length of the trunk rather than just bulging the belly.
Client Education
Children are always learning something new--both wisdom and bad habits--modeled by their parents. Like children, muscles learn whatever we train them to do, whether or not the training is deliberate. The athlete trains the muscles for sport, the office worker trains for sitting, and the assembly line worker for repetitive motion. If you are slouching as you read this, you are training your muscles to slump, which can lead to championship slouching and a world-class pain pattern.
Postural muscles work isometrically and can be trained in a
stationary posture using slow, isometric contractions. A lot of massage is oriented toward getting our muscles to relax. All too often, the client gets up after a session feeling better, but leaves with the same body pattern and returns to the next session with the same old pain pattern. For this reason, it is important to teach clients intentional movements that organize new neuromuscular pathways. Having your client isometrically contract postural muscles during the massage benefits both of you. Your client learns neuromuscular pathways for optimal alignment, and your work becomes easier because once postural muscles start working, prime movers stop overworking.
Tonic and Phasic Functions
There are several different types of muscle fibers, the most familiar two being slow and fast fibers. Each fiber is defined by its physiology and varies in its function (see Figure 3). Slow fibers contract slowly and weakly, yet are fatigue resistant. Fast fibers contract quickly and strongly, yet fatigue rapidly.
Although muscles have combinations of both fiber types, some muscles have more of one than the other. Muscles with predominantly slow fibers are best suited for the "tonic" (slow) contractions. Because they are fatigue-resistant, these "antigravity" muscles can work all day without tiring. This means that if you are using the right muscles, you can easily sit and stand for hours without pain.
The muscles that generate movement (the prime movers) generally have more fast fibers. The prime movers are usually large, extrinsic muscles that are well suited for "phasic" (fast and strong) contractions.
Exercise 3. Differentiating Tonic and Phasic Contractions
For effective postural education, it is important to feel the difference between tonic and phasic contractions.
- Sit in an upright position, on top of your sit bones.
- Contract your abdominal muscles hard and fast, then hold. This strong phasic contraction will flex your trunk and pull your ribs down. How long can you hold before your muscles tire? Notice how it affects your breathing.
- Relax. Slowly and gently draw your lower abdominal muscle above your pubic bone straight back and hold. Use minimal effort.
- If you are doing this correctly, you'll be able to hold this tonic contraction for a long time without tiring. This is the quality of contraction used to train all postural muscles.
Axial Compression and Joint Stability
Postural muscles also stabilize the joints by preventing excessive joint play as we move (see Figure 4). They work like cargo ties on a ship, securing cargo so that when the ship takes off the cargo moves with the ship rather than flying around the deck. The psoas major and multifidus muscles are local stabilizers that protect the lumbar spine by pulling the lumbar vertebrae closer together, increasing axial compression in an agonist/antagonist relationship (see Figure 5). If the lumbar curve is too flat, a person can activate the psoas muscle to restore a natural lumbar lordosis. If the lumbar curve is overly swayed, a person can activate the multifidus muscle to pull it back.
Exercise 4. Activating Postural Muscles in the Lumbar Spine
- Sit upright, on top of your sit bones.
- Lightly contract your lower abdominal wall as described in Exercise 3.
- Place your fingertips over your psoas tendons to monitor them. Keeping your spine straight, rock backward over your sit bones (see Exercise 3).
- Keep the psoas contracted as you lean forward and return to your original position. If your psoas is off, this sounds easier than it is.
- Next, place your fingertips along your lumbar spine in the lamina groove. Keeping your spine straight, rock forward over your sit bones (see Exercise 4). Feel the multifidus contract and bulge under your fingers. (If it is already working, you will not feel a change in tone.)
- Keep this muscle contracted as you lean back and return to your original position. If your multifidus is off, this sounds easier than it is.
- When both psoas and multifidus are gently contracted, you should feel a long stable curve in your lumbar spine.
Joint Instability and Pain
Joint instability is common in people with poor posture, particularly with collapsed or bent spines. Each movement outside normal joint range injures an unstable joint, overstretching its ligaments, causing muscle spasms, and increasing mechanical stresses. Joint instability creates a twofold muscular dysfunction: one in the postural system, the other with the prime movers. Pain from joint instability causes stabilizing muscles to turn off and the prime movers to take over their job. Since the prime movers span long distances and have strong lever arms that bend joints, they work poorly as stabilizers (see Figure 6). They also fatigue rapidly and become ischemic and fibrous, which causes more pain, further inhibiting the stabilizers and leading to more pain and spasm, and so the cycle escalates (see Figure 7, page 82).
The cycle can be broken with a twofold intervention, using bodywork to release overworked prime movers coupled with intentional movement that activates underworked stabilizers.
Control Versus Strength
Traditionally, the solution for correcting faulty alignment includes strength training. The prime movers respond to this type of training. Postural stabilizers, however, usually do not need strengthening, instead, we need to regain their capacity for control of alignment. Control means contracting them at will, keeping them on, and coordinating their contractions with the prime movers during movement.
Training postural muscles is quite easy once you learn to feel them work, although their minimal contractions provide little feedback, making them difficult to sense. In contrast, it's easy to feel the large muscles contracting strongly during a strength-training workout. Another difficult part about training them is the focus and mental effort it takes to get an inert muscle working. The amount of effort is akin to trying to get your limbs moving again after they fall asleep.
The most difficult part of postural muscle training is avoiding overwork. Many people are oriented toward working muscles hard, strong, and fast in strength training. This training requires a quieter, slower orientation--it takes patience and the ability to track subtle changes in tone.
Exercise 5. The Postural Flute
Lightly contract one note at a time. Keep it contracted as you move to the next note so that by the end, all your postural muscles are co-contracted. Use minimal effort. If you tend to overwork, only visualize each muscle contracting, which will be enough to begin waking them up.
- Sit or lie in a comfortable position with your spine in neutral (no excessive curves or slouching).
- Perineal muscles. Lightly and slowly pull your sit bones together and hold (see Exercise 1).
- Transversus abdominis muscle. Next, slowly draw the muscles above your pubic bone straight back toward your sacrum (see Exercise 3).
- Psoas and multifidus muscles. Now increase tone along the front and back of your lumbar spine (see Exercise 4).
- Diaphragm. Gently breathe into your lower ribs, widening them as you inhale (see Exercise 2).
- Lower trapezius. Imagine sandbags on the bottom of your scapulas, lightly drawing them down (see Figure 2). Allow the front of your shoulders to lift and widen. Stay wide and relaxed between your shoulder blades.
- Cervical intrinsics. Lightly lift the back of your head without lowering your chin, which should lengthen your neck (see Exercises 5A and 5B).
- Playing each note. Breathe easily while mentally reviewing each note on your postural flute. Sense your neck lengthening front and back, feel your scapulas sinking and widening, breathe into the width of your lower ribs, sense tone increasing along the front and back of your lumbar spine, feel your lower abdomen drawing back, and sense tone gathering between your sit bones.
- Gently hold and breathe into your lower ribs, then completely relax.
Remember, posture is an inside job. Your body is the instrument and you are always in training. Since the stabilizing muscles work without movement, you can train them anywhere, anytime. No one can tell you are practicing subtle isometrics, so contract your postural muscles whenever you can--while sitting or standing, during massage, as you travel, and even while reading this magazine. Play your postural flute every day and it will pay off! You'll look better, feel better, and become adept at therapeutic patterning skills your clients are likely to want and need.
Mary Ann Foster, author of Somatic Patterning (EMS Press, 2004), has been a massage therapist and movement educator for twenty-five years. She teaches movement classes at the Boulder College of Massage Therapy in Colorado. Contact her at info@emspress.com.
Note
1. There are many different ways to activate a postural muscle. Because of space limitations, only a few are named here. For more exercises, see Chapter 9 in my book, Somatic Patterning (EMS Press, 2004).
Most massage therapists know the havoc poor posture can wreak on the body. It bends and stresses the joints, locks major muscles in chronic contractions, restricts movement and causes pain, and gradually wears the musculoskeletal system down. Postural dysfunctions can even result in injury, which occurs suddenly when the smallest turn or twist snaps the weakest link. In addition to all this, poor posture simply looks and feels bad.
On an emotional level, posture is attitude. Postural patterns often begin as protective cloaks we wear to guard against emotional pain, which manifests both physically and psychologically. After all, it is hard to stand tall when you're feeling depressed, and it's hard to feel down when you're standing tall.
On a mechanical level, posture is more than a position. It is the dynamic balancing act of a group of postural muscles working together to keep our slightly swaying bodies upright. In this regard, posture is an inside job. Only you can change your posture because only you can control your muscle patterns. And if you can feel these changes in yourself, you'll be better at helping your clients do the same.
Most of us have an idea what good posture is, but how to achieve it is the issue. A common yet misguided correction is to straighten the spine and hold it there. Yet when the muscles tire, the trunk slowly sinks into an all-too-familiar, unsightly slump. In this article we'll look at these dynamics, exploring muscle function through the postural lens.
The Postural Flute
Our postural muscles work together toward a single goal: to keep our bodies upright. Far less muscular effort is needed to support a vertical spine oriented along gravity's pull than to maintain a horizontal spine suspended between four legs. Because the postural muscles work together to support a single axis, the human stance is the most efficient of any animal.
The drawback of this incredible efficiency is that if any one muscle along the chain of support fails to function, the economy of the whole system declines in reverse proportion. For example, a forward head creates muscular compensations (read: excessive contraction) throughout the body.
One can activate the postural muscles like the notes on a flute, harmony lies in the balance of tone among the notes (see Figure 1). The key to effective postural education is determining which muscles along the flute are not working, then activating them.1
Contract and Relax
The first step in changing body patterns is awareness, or sensing the muscles as they work. A muscle cell is limited to two functions: contraction and relaxation. The smallest contractile unit of a muscle is a motor unit--a motor nerve plus all the muscle cells it innervates. A single muscle has anywhere from fifty to thousands of motor units, the muscle's resting tone is determined by the number of motor units firing when the body is relaxed.
Muscle relaxation is a graded process. Total relaxation is impossible. If all your muscles were to relax right now, your body would collapse. Lucky for us, the skeletal muscles work reflexively (see Figure 2, page 78). Some motor units are always working, even when we sleep. When we are up, all of our postural muscles should be on to support us.
Exercise 1. Contract and Relax
The first step in training a postural muscle is being able to distinguish between contraction and relaxation.
- Begin sitting or standing in a comfortable, upright position. Place your hands on your lower abdomen, right above your pubic bone (see Exercise 1). Let your abdominal muscles completely relax and hang out.
- Slowly contract the perineal muscles between your sit bones, as though you had to go to the restroom and were holding it. Did the tone change in your lower abdomen? The muscles should tighten right above the pubic bone because the perineum co-contracts with the transversus abdominis muscles.
- Relax the perineum. Practice slowly contracting and relaxing until you can feel the difference.
Adaptation and Habit
Skeletal muscles are highly adaptable and can change in an instant. They can melt under skilled hands or seize up at a mere hint of danger. Muscles are also creatures of habit. Muscular habits show up in an individual's unique stance and style of movement. When we recognize a friend at a distance by his distinct strut, we are registering the familiar shape of his habitual patterns.
Muscles quickly habituate to how we use them because once neuromuscular pathways are established, nerve impulses like to travel along these familiar routes. Worn neuromuscular pathways are like ruts in the road: unless we consciously steer away from them, they are easy to fall into. For example, after twenty-five years of driving a standard car, I now drive an automatic. But when I'm tired or distracted, my foot still pushes for the clutch as though it had a mind of its own! Intentional movement is the key to breaking muscular habits.
Exercise 2. Transversus Abdominis and Diaphragmatic Breathing
Intentional diaphragmatic breathing is crucial to balancing vertical tone among the "notes," or muscles, of the postural flute.
- The lateral expansion of the lower ribs is the hallmark of diaphragmatic breathing. To feel this, place your hands over each side of your lower ribs. Close your eyes and breathe easy.
- On each inhalation, expand your lower ribs into your hands (see Exercise 2). Continue to breathe like this until it feels comfortable. If you're not a diaphragmatic breather, it will be difficult and may take months of practice to repattern.
- Now allow your abdominal muscles to relax and distend your belly. Take several breaths, expanding your lower ribs on each inhalation. Distending the belly usually restricts diaphragmatic breathing.
- Relax. Next, put your hands on each side of your lower abdominal wall. Slowly and lightly contract the transversus abdominis muscle, drawing your lower abdominal muscles back toward your sacrum. Use minimal effort and hold.
- As you lightly hold your lower abdominals, return to breathing into your lower ribs. This should feel easier than the diaphragmatic breathing you did in step 3, when your belly was distended. Lightly contracting the transversus abdominis contains the viscera and keeps the diaphragm from bottoming out, so expansion from inhaling spreads along the length of the trunk rather than just bulging the belly.
Client Education
Children are always learning something new--both wisdom and bad habits--modeled by their parents. Like children, muscles learn whatever we train them to do, whether or not the training is deliberate. The athlete trains the muscles for sport, the office worker trains for sitting, and the assembly line worker for repetitive motion. If you are slouching as you read this, you are training your muscles to slump, which can lead to championship slouching and a world-class pain pattern.
Postural muscles work isometrically and can be trained in a
stationary posture using slow, isometric contractions. A lot of massage is oriented toward getting our muscles to relax. All too often, the client gets up after a session feeling better, but leaves with the same body pattern and returns to the next session with the same old pain pattern. For this reason, it is important to teach clients intentional movements that organize new neuromuscular pathways. Having your client isometrically contract postural muscles during the massage benefits both of you. Your client learns neuromuscular pathways for optimal alignment, and your work becomes easier because once postural muscles start working, prime movers stop overworking.
Tonic and Phasic Functions
There are several different types of muscle fibers, the most familiar two being slow and fast fibers. Each fiber is defined by its physiology and varies in its function (see Figure 3). Slow fibers contract slowly and weakly, yet are fatigue resistant. Fast fibers contract quickly and strongly, yet fatigue rapidly.
Although muscles have combinations of both fiber types, some muscles have more of one than the other. Muscles with predominantly slow fibers are best suited for the "tonic" (slow) contractions. Because they are fatigue-resistant, these "antigravity" muscles can work all day without tiring. This means that if you are using the right muscles, you can easily sit and stand for hours without pain.
The muscles that generate movement (the prime movers) generally have more fast fibers. The prime movers are usually large, extrinsic muscles that are well suited for "phasic" (fast and strong) contractions.
Exercise 3. Differentiating Tonic and Phasic Contractions
For effective postural education, it is important to feel the difference between tonic and phasic contractions.
- Sit in an upright position, on top of your sit bones.
- Contract your abdominal muscles hard and fast, then hold. This strong phasic contraction will flex your trunk and pull your ribs down. How long can you hold before your muscles tire? Notice how it affects your breathing.
- Relax. Slowly and gently draw your lower abdominal muscle above your pubic bone straight back and hold. Use minimal effort.
- If you are doing this correctly, you'll be able to hold this tonic contraction for a long time without tiring. This is the quality of contraction used to train all postural muscles.
Axial Compression and Joint Stability
Postural muscles also stabilize the joints by preventing excessive joint play as we move (see Figure 4). They work like cargo ties on a ship, securing cargo so that when the ship takes off the cargo moves with the ship rather than flying around the deck. The psoas major and multifidus muscles are local stabilizers that protect the lumbar spine by pulling the lumbar vertebrae closer together, increasing axial compression in an agonist/antagonist relationship (see Figure 5). If the lumbar curve is too flat, a person can activate the psoas muscle to restore a natural lumbar lordosis. If the lumbar curve is overly swayed, a person can activate the multifidus muscle to pull it back.
Exercise 4. Activating Postural Muscles in the Lumbar Spine
- Sit upright, on top of your sit bones.
- Lightly contract your lower abdominal wall as described in Exercise 3.
- Place your fingertips over your psoas tendons to monitor them. Keeping your spine straight, rock backward over your sit bones (see Exercise 3).
- Keep the psoas contracted as you lean forward and return to your original position. If your psoas is off, this sounds easier than it is.
- Next, place your fingertips along your lumbar spine in the lamina groove. Keeping your spine straight, rock forward over your sit bones (see Exercise 4). Feel the multifidus contract and bulge under your fingers. (If it is already working, you will not feel a change in tone.)
- Keep this muscle contracted as you lean back and return to your original position. If your multifidus is off, this sounds easier than it is.
- When both psoas and multifidus are gently contracted, you should feel a long stable curve in your lumbar spine.
Joint Instability and Pain
Joint instability is common in people with poor posture, particularly with collapsed or bent spines. Each movement outside normal joint range injures an unstable joint, overstretching its ligaments, causing muscle spasms, and increasing mechanical stresses. Joint instability creates a twofold muscular dysfunction: one in the postural system, the other with the prime movers. Pain from joint instability causes stabilizing muscles to turn off and the prime movers to take over their job. Since the prime movers span long distances and have strong lever arms that bend joints, they work poorly as stabilizers (see Figure 6). They also fatigue rapidly and become ischemic and fibrous, which causes more pain, further inhibiting the stabilizers and leading to more pain and spasm, and so the cycle escalates (see Figure 7, page 82).
The cycle can be broken with a twofold intervention, using bodywork to release overworked prime movers coupled with intentional movement that activates underworked stabilizers.
Control Versus Strength
Traditionally, the solution for correcting faulty alignment includes strength training. The prime movers respond to this type of training. Postural stabilizers, however, usually do not need strengthening, instead, we need to regain their capacity for control of alignment. Control means contracting them at will, keeping them on, and coordinating their contractions with the prime movers during movement.
Training postural muscles is quite easy once you learn to feel them work, although their minimal contractions provide little feedback, making them difficult to sense. In contrast, it's easy to feel the large muscles contracting strongly during a strength-training workout. Another difficult part about training them is the focus and mental effort it takes to get an inert muscle working. The amount of effort is akin to trying to get your limbs moving again after they fall asleep.
The most difficult part of postural muscle training is avoiding overwork. Many people are oriented toward working muscles hard, strong, and fast in strength training. This training requires a quieter, slower orientation--it takes patience and the ability to track subtle changes in tone.
Exercise 5. The Postural Flute
Lightly contract one note at a time. Keep it contracted as you move to the next note so that by the end, all your postural muscles are co-contracted. Use minimal effort. If you tend to overwork, only visualize each muscle contracting, which will be enough to begin waking them up.
- Sit or lie in a comfortable position with your spine in neutral (no excessive curves or slouching).
- Perineal muscles. Lightly and slowly pull your sit bones together and hold (see Exercise 1).
- Transversus abdominis muscle. Next, slowly draw the muscles above your pubic bone straight back toward your sacrum (see Exercise 3).
- Psoas and multifidus muscles. Now increase tone along the front and back of your lumbar spine (see Exercise 4).
- Diaphragm. Gently breathe into your lower ribs, widening them as you inhale (see Exercise 2).
- Lower trapezius. Imagine sandbags on the bottom of your scapulas, lightly drawing them down (see Figure 2). Allow the front of your shoulders to lift and widen. Stay wide and relaxed between your shoulder blades.
- Cervical intrinsics. Lightly lift the back of your head without lowering your chin, which should lengthen your neck (see Exercises 5A and 5B).
- Playing each note. Breathe easily while mentally reviewing each note on your postural flute. Sense your neck lengthening front and back, feel your scapulas sinking and widening, breathe into the width of your lower ribs, sense tone increasing along the front and back of your lumbar spine, feel your lower abdomen drawing back, and sense tone gathering between your sit bones.
- Gently hold and breathe into your lower ribs, then completely relax.
Remember, posture is an inside job. Your body is the instrument and you are always in training. Since the stabilizing muscles work without movement, you can train them anywhere, anytime. No one can tell you are practicing subtle isometrics, so contract your postural muscles whenever you can--while sitting or standing, during massage, as you travel, and even while reading this magazine. Play your postural flute every day and it will pay off! You'll look better, feel better, and become adept at therapeutic patterning skills your clients are likely to want and need.
Mary Ann Foster, author of Somatic Patterning (EMS Press, 2004), has been a massage therapist and movement educator for twenty-five years. She teaches movement classes at the Boulder College of Massage Therapy in Colorado. Contact her at info@emspress.com.
Note
1. There are many different ways to activate a postural muscle. Because of space limitations, only a few are named here. For more exercises, see Chapter 9 in my book, Somatic Patterning (EMS Press, 2004).
