Postural Assessment: A Tool to Mark Progress

Recently, I’ve been learning a lot about posture and how it affects our ability to move through the world. Did you know that your posture fluctuates every day? It even looks different throughout the day.

Posture is affected by your emotional state, physical surroundings, quality of sleep, and the constant stream of sensory input that you subconsciously process.

Just as we develop mental coping strategies (healthy or otherwise) to deal with challenging emotions, our bodies develop physical compensation patterns to manage these stresses. They do all this while under the unrelenting force of gravity! And because your body will do everything it can to keep you moving, it may create a problematic posture to help you get along. Most of the time you don’t realize it’s happening until you feel discomfort or pain, which is a signal for help.

The point of Pilates is to create functional movement for all your activities, not just on the Reformer.

As a Pilates instructor, one of my goals is to help you recognize movement patterns that don’t serve you. One way I do this is by doing a postural assessment, which gives me the information I need to create your personalized program. Even better, it empowers you with a new level of self knowledge that you can apply in your everyday life and work. After all, the point of Pilates is to create functional movement for all your activities, not just on the Reformer.

I plan to offer a full or partial postural assessment as part of your Pilates training with me. This is an excellent way to get an outside perspective on habits you may not know you have. We can do the assessment as a new client appointment or at any point during our work together.

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