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weird athletic hobby
Jun. 25th, 2015 12:19 amI had a routine physical two weeks ago and the nurse measured my height at 5'5", which means either I was slouching or I've shrunk an inch, and I know I was slouching, but what if I've also shrunk an inch?
For this and other reasons, I've been paying more attention to my posture, which for the past year I would characterize as "keyboard slump." This is a deviation from my norm; I was trained on piano before I started typing, so I've traditionally held myself piano style in front of a computer, plus I have a long history of being shorter than most of my friends, which doesn't making slouching advisable. (I'm not particularly short, but I tended to be the youngest in my class, and then spent a lot of time surrounded by the Richardson Boys, average height 6 feet.) Aside from which, you don't become a film director unless you're determined other people ought to listen to you; proper posture helps convince total strangers you're commanding, which has always been relevant to my interests.
But for medical reasons I had to stop doing core exercises for a while about two years ago, and although I rehabbed myself afterward - maybe you've heard or experienced that in physical therapy, there's a tendency to get things back to 80% and say "you're cured!" I wasn't in formal physical therapy, but I did that to myself, partly because I'm busy. Once I could pretty much get a move on, I did. And clearly continued to compensate by making my small muscle groups pick up the slack from the major ones.
Standing up straight is very tiring. I'm really only moving my shoulders slightly, in a way that should long-term require less energy - good posture being "good" not simply for aesthetic reasons but because it minimizes stress to a human skeletal armature. But I'm asking certain muscle fibers to bear a lot of weight they've gotten out of the habit of holding. At least I'm fixing it now, when it's presumably easier than it would be later, but makes for a weird athletic hobby that's hard to brag about.
For this and other reasons, I've been paying more attention to my posture, which for the past year I would characterize as "keyboard slump." This is a deviation from my norm; I was trained on piano before I started typing, so I've traditionally held myself piano style in front of a computer, plus I have a long history of being shorter than most of my friends, which doesn't making slouching advisable. (I'm not particularly short, but I tended to be the youngest in my class, and then spent a lot of time surrounded by the Richardson Boys, average height 6 feet.) Aside from which, you don't become a film director unless you're determined other people ought to listen to you; proper posture helps convince total strangers you're commanding, which has always been relevant to my interests.
But for medical reasons I had to stop doing core exercises for a while about two years ago, and although I rehabbed myself afterward - maybe you've heard or experienced that in physical therapy, there's a tendency to get things back to 80% and say "you're cured!" I wasn't in formal physical therapy, but I did that to myself, partly because I'm busy. Once I could pretty much get a move on, I did. And clearly continued to compensate by making my small muscle groups pick up the slack from the major ones.
Standing up straight is very tiring. I'm really only moving my shoulders slightly, in a way that should long-term require less energy - good posture being "good" not simply for aesthetic reasons but because it minimizes stress to a human skeletal armature. But I'm asking certain muscle fibers to bear a lot of weight they've gotten out of the habit of holding. At least I'm fixing it now, when it's presumably easier than it would be later, but makes for a weird athletic hobby that's hard to brag about.
