Posture and Health

The posture of a person tells us a great deal about his state of health, his psychological state, as well as about the traumas of his childhood.

It is not my purpose to provide here a class of body mechanics or osteopathy, but only to give some advice which seems to me fundamental to integrate in one’s daily life, as well as in the practice of the martial arts.

- The 10 toes must touch the ground (this is not always the case with Westerners, due to shoes, worn from the first months of life). It is easy to correct them, by walking bare feet as frequently as possible and distributing the weight of the body (its mass) between the 10 toes, the bowl of the foot and the heel. A bad bone position of the feet inexorably entails abnormal ligament tractions, provoking compensations, modification of the balance, joints and muscular weaknesses, torsions and pinches to the spine and inter-vertebral discs, compression of the nerve endings, etc.

It is necessary to visualize out two feet as being two triangles whose bases would be the toes and the summits the two heels. The three points of each triangle (the big toe, the little toe and the heel) must be touching the ground to be in balance. If one of the three is not, the balance is broken.

- The knees and the toes must go in the same direction. It is necessary to avoid locking them, and to have flexible thighs not to drag the kneecap and the patellar tendon upwards. It is good, while standing, to bend the legs just a little in order not to put too much pressure on the knees.

- The pelvis slightly tilted forward and upward to avoid an excessive camber.

- The spine has to be straight, respecting its natural curves without exaggerating them.

- Pull the top of the skull upwards and bring the chin slightly in, in order to reduce the cervical hollow and thus align the head with the body.

I insist on the word “posture” because the posture is for me the opposite of a “position”.

I often see martial arts practitioners trying to correct their stances, their fighting positions. That doesn’t make any sense because position does not exist in combat. Combat in nothing but pure movement, continuous, uninterrupted, and fluid. For a position to exist, it is necessary for one to stop, which is impossible in a fight. To focus on posture is of course necessary at the begining, but one has to rapidly move to movement and intuition exercises to be effective in combat.

Also, one has less risk of injury while doing martial arts if not training with complicated stances or positions where joints can get hurt. To correct his own posture allows the practitioner to fix all the little mysterious pains of every day life.

Martial arts and sport instructors in general, must be very vigilant on the correct posture of each student, as well as on stretching exercises which can be really dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. A lot of body-mechanic mistakes were slipped into the stretches of classical martial arts schools, such as a bad knee position when doing lateral split, bad pelvis position when doing a full front split, or even rounded back for any kind of stretch.

I was lucky to be able to correct my routines because of appropriate meetings with physiotherapists and osteopaths, and I encourage any martial arts instructor to go to such persons in order to protect his health and his students’.