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Welcome to class!
In today’s class, we will be talking about good posture. Enjoy the class!
Good Posture
The key to good posture is the position of your spine. Your spine has three natural curves – at your neck, mid-back, and low back. Correct posture should maintain these curves, but not increase them. Your head should be above your shoulders, and the top of your shoulder should be over the hips.
The benefits of good posture
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Improves bodily alignment:
When you stand and sit with your body properly aligned, all your organs can function as intended. This includes your stomach, which is why good posture may improve digestion.
Eliminates back and neck pain. When you have proper posture, your bones and spine can easily and efficiently balance and support your body’s weight. When you have improper posture, muscles, tendons, and ligaments have to constantly work to support that same weight. Focusing on improving your posture can go a long way to remedying these problems.
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Improves breathing:
To work efficiently, your lungs need room to expand in your chest. When you’re slumped over, your rib cage collapses a bit, leaving less room for your lungs to open, which in turn causes inefficient breathing.
Improves memory and learning. Recent research has shown there may be a connection between good posture and memory retention when learning new things. Why? It’s theorized that since good posture enhances your breathing, it allows you to take in more oxygen, and when you take in more oxygen, your cognition improves. (Fast fact: your brain uses about 25% of all the oxygen in your body.)
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Makes you look taller and slimmer:
Some poor posture positions cause your belly to protrude, giving you a “beer belly” profile. And slumping over makes you appear shorter than you are. Standing up straight will correct these issues and improve your appearance.
Makes you look confident and powerful. When we stand in an upright position, people perceive us as having high status. There are a few reasons why:
- First, as we discussed in our series on the nature of status, height and physique are two embodied status markers humans use to size each other up. Research shows that taller, fitter-looking men are not only judged to be more attractive by the opposite sex, they also earn more over their lifetime than shorter and overweight men. While you can’t do much about the height that God has given you, you can make the most of what you’ve got by standing up straight with proper posture.
- Second, an open, upright stance is simply perceived as more authoritative and dominant. You see this even with animals. When chimps or dogs are submissive, they’ll bow their heads and make themselves look small. Dominant animals, on the other hand, stand up straight and take up more room. An upright posture is a “power pose” that conveys confidence and status to other humans.
- Finally, good posture makes you seem more trustworthy. There’s a reason being “upright” and “standing tall” are used to describe someone virtuous and committed to their principles. Those who slumps seem to be burdened by some weight perhaps that of their faults and deceptions. Men who stand straight are thus perceived as open and honest.
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Makes you feel confident and powerful:
There’s a reason military have focused for more than a century on giving their soldiers’ posture training. They’ve seen that standing straight improves troops’ bearing and morale, and now modern researchers have started to prove this intuitive observation.
In our next class, we will be talking about Cosmetic and Deodorants. We hope you enjoyed the class.
Should you have any further question, feel free to ask in the comment section below and trust us to respond as soon as possible.
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