Posture Test

A lot of back pain is simply due to poor posture. If you are a back pain sufferer, it is certainly worth working on your posture in the hope of improving your back problem or at least preventing things getting worse. It is well worth trying to encourage good postural habits in children from an early age as bad habits are hard to change.

Posture test

You can check your posture by standing in bare feet with your back to the wall. Slowly press your body back to touch the wall. If you have good posture, only your hair, shoulder blades and bottom should touch the wall. You should be able to place one hand between the wall and your lower back. If you can place a whole fist between your lower back and the wall, or your shoulders touch the wall before your bottom, your pelvis is too far forward and you need to practise the pelvic tilt. If you feel one side of your body touch the wall before the other, you are lopsided and need to work on levelling your body out with side bends and rotations. If your entire body is in contact with the wall, your posture is too rigid. This can lead to fatigue and labored breathing. It also produces a lot of tension in the neck, which can cause pain elsewhere in the spine. You need to soften out so that there is a gap between your lower back and the wall.

The shape of your spine

Not many people have a perfectly aligned spine and there are many degrees of variation. It is important to recognise and correct a crooked spine as this can stretch or compress nerves and other spinal structures. Although you can't change the shape of the spine you were born with, improved posture and regular stretching exercises can help rebalance the situation.

Lordotic Spine

Often called a 'sway back', this type of spine hollows out in the lower back. A lordotic spine is common in overweight people ( or pregnant women) because the weight around the abdomen will pull them forwards. 

Kyphotic back

This is an exaggerated thoracic curve that  results in s hunched back. A kyphotic back can generally be corrected with stretching and postural exercises. A dowager's hump can be caused by the weight of the head and weak muscles where the neck joins the thoracic column. This is often just a symptom of the ageing process.

Scoliosis

This is the curvature of the spine: instead of being straight, the spine bends sideways in an 's' shape. Mild cases of scoliosis are very common and can be helped by doing stretching exercises to straighten the spine. As with a kyphotic back, extreme cases may require metal rods to be inserted on either side of the spine to keep it straight and stable to prevent nerve and other soft-tissue compression.