Boom town Calgary, Alberta has kept me busy for more than a decade. Closing in on 20 000 hours delving in the tissues, of thousands of clientele, have revealed much about how we hold tension, how our posture changes, and what keeps our muscular system from freedom of pain and restriction, having balance and maintaining fluid movement.

There are a multitude of factors that lead to pain and discomfort. One of the biggest and most managed causes is stress. It affects all of us. We deal with it, adapt to it, and try to avoid it! Stress in all its forms finds its way into our lives from countless sources. I start with stress, because of its compounding affect on everything else. All things contributing to postural stain are only made worse by stress.

The greatest factor affecting peoples predominant posture, which impacts how we move, feel, and cope with everything, is completely tied to habitual postures. Sounds vague? Let me narrow it down to the three habitual patterns which affect your postural reality the most.

There is nothing you do more each day than standing, sitting, and sleeping!

How you uniquely do all three of these things will be the greatest determinants of your postural reality. They will be more impactful than the bruises, falls and accidents throughout life, or even the genetic make up you inherited. Nothing will have greater impact than the three things you spend the most time doing. I can think of no time in the day when you're not in one of these three postures! How do you sit? How do you lay on your bed for hours every night? How do you stand throughout the day?

Many of my massage therapy clients have office jobs that require them to maintain a seated position anywhere from 4-8 hours every day! This may not appear to be significant, but lets look a little closer. Lets take the lesser of the two and do some basic math: 4 hours a day, 20 hours a week, and 80 hours a month, equals over 900 hours a year holding a seated position. Of course, that's only at work! There is the time spent seated in the car, on the couch, at the kitchen table, or at the coffee shop. Obviously we could double that 900 hours a year and still not account for all the time spent in this posturally challenging position!

The Psoas and Rectus Femoris muscles are our primary hip flexors. They are held in a significantly shortened position while we sit for long periods. The major one is the Psoas, which attaches on the anterolateral aspect of our lumbar spine. It follows downward to attach to our thigh bone, the femur. Holding a seated posture for many hours a day trains this muscle to be a shorter muscle. The problems of low back pain and discomfort begin when we try to stand after long periods of sitting. The Psoas' attempts to maintain the shortened length cause it to pull the lumbar spine forward toward the femur. The low back tends to tighten or even spasm to prevent this forward pull. Over long periods of time the result is chronic back pain.

Having your knees bent at 90 degrees, for countless yearly hours of sitting, also tends to lead to incredibly tight hamstrings! No wonder as we age it gets to harder to touch our toes! Sitting is also hardly kind to our neck and shoulders.

Massage Therapists' work on a host of issues their clients present with, which arise from spending hours on a mouse and keyboard. Hours spent with their heads drifting forward towards their monitors, shift the weight of the head to neck and shoulder muscles that are made to perform movements rather than support a near 10lbs bowling ball! Other habitual patterns such as leaning on one butt cheek more than the other, pinning a phone to the ear with the shoulder, and being far from ambidextrous with the mouse, highlight the many reasons why sitting contributes to many of the postural imbalances which massage therapy address nearly everyday.

The second habitual posture we all have our own variation of, is how we stand. It is something rarely given much attention, but all of us have a habitual standing posture. Simply bringing your awareness to your body while standing at any given moment can reveal interesting things about how your muscles have their way with your skeletal structure.

Whenever it comes to mind, glance down at your feet. How are your feet positioned? Are they both pointing in the same direction? Is one pointing to three o'clock and the other at high noon? More importantly, is this the dominant theme occurring every time you glance down at your feet? Is one foot consistently in front of the other? Is there more weight on one side than the other? These are all things that help to reveal which muscles are holding the limbs in these habitual patterns. Massage therapy will help you discover these habitual patterns and work to bring your muscles into balance to better synergize and optimize your biomechanics.

Our musculature is a perfect design. Every muscle works in concert with it's opposite, to grant us fluid, painless, dynamic movement and function. While one muscle is extending, its opposite is flexing. Our bodies are functioning optimally when our muscles are balanced in strength, length, and flexibility.

Massage Therapists' assist in revealing our habitual patterns that contribute to the postural distortions. By introducing opposition to our habitual postures, we can begin to bring awareness to the balance that lies between the two. Here, freedom from our discomfort and postural strain awaits us. Unfortunately, sleep is not an escape from postural strain.

Have you aver tried switching sides of the bed? Your partner not too interested? Likely you haven't been too interested either! Why? We are habitual creatures. We move in habitual ways and do habitual things. We also sleep in very habitual patterns. Some people sleep on their stomachs. Their head tends to be rotated and laterally flexed for many hours a night.

Side sleepers have their own unique way too. Most sleep predominately on one side. One shoulder gets compressed against the mattress. The legs are rarely held in the exact same position. One may be straight, while the other is flexed at both the hip and the knee. Again these are habitual postures that are held for many hours a night. How do you think your long held sleeping postures, are affecting you standing posture? Your standing posture has been greatly influenced by the sleeping posture you maintained for 6-8 hours last night! Our body want to move into positions that it spends the most amount of time in. Our own sense of what normal standing posture should be, fights against it. Our muscular systems are unconsciously trained to meet the demands of our most dominantly held postures. These are usually in conflict with our perception of what is considered "good posture".

Massage therapy focuses intently on those muscles holding you in out-of-balance postures. Once these muscles are released of tension, your body enjoys the experience of a more fluid and pain-free range of motion. If you can move daily into positions and ranges which oppose your habitual patterns, you are encouraging a state of balance. With a little help from your massage therapist, you will discover more about your body and how your habitual postures become your unconscious postures. Through the massage therapy process you will encounter new postures thereby helping to bring conscious awareness and balance to your body.