Bad Posture: How it Affects Your Breathing

Bad posture can negatively impact your life in so many ways, including your breathing. And breathing, as you know, is absolutely essential for human life. Before we examine how bad posture affects your breathing, you need to understand how abnormal posture arises in the first place.

Bad posture arises because of two main reasons:

1. Your tonic muscles, responsible for holding your posture, constrict and tighten over time if you do not stretch them periodically.

2. Your phasic muscles, used for dynamic movement, weaken and lengthen.

Our bodies were not designed for sitting for long periods. Nowadays, we spend so much time crouched over a computer either at work or at home on the Internet. Before you know it, you develop a slouch. Over time, the slouch gets worse.

The problem with bad posture is that your body seeks to maintain some kind of balance, so it compensates for your bad posture by making it worse. For example, if you have forward head posture, your hips move forward to compensate for the added weight of your head and eventually you get bent out of shape.

So exactly how does bad posture affect your breathing? Have you ever tried sitting in your chair, leaning forward and breathing?

Poor posture results in restricted, shallow breathing and affects your energy levels and productivity. Add to this the stress that we all have to endure nowadays and you have a recipe for disaster. The resultant tight muscles in your upper body are like a giant elastic band around your chest. To breathe correctly, your diaphragm has to more upwards and outwards. The tight muscles restrict this movement and prevent you from breathing effortlessly. This is not normal – breathing is supposed to be automatic.

Not breathing correctly can upset your normal body chemistry. Your blood oxygen and blood carbon dioxide levels begin to fluctuate under stress and certain organs systems become affected. This manifests itself in panic, anxiety and stress.

Breathing badly can lead to an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, muscle pain and blood circulation. Some of the symptoms associated with bad breathing are pains in your hands, feet and muscles, dizziness, shortness of breath, pins and needles, pain over the heart and shaking. The list goes on.

Fortunately, you can correct bad posture. One way is to stretch, and one of the best ways to stretch is to use a posture cushion specifically designed to reverse bad and forward head posture.

There is an old proverb: "Life is in the breath. He who half breathes, half lives." So improve your posture now – live life to the fullest!

To learn more about improving your posture, please visit http://www.posturepal.com/