Hi, I’m Jaclynn Reifman. I am a licensed occupational therapist working for Sharp Healthcare
and today I’m going to be talking about proper posture. One of the important concepts
to remember anytime you’re looking at posture is to understand the concept of a neutral
joint position. Neutral joint positions allow us to put the least amount of stress on a
joint and the surrounding structures. It gives us the best biomechanical advantage. So, I’m
going to demonstrate the neutral position for the spine because everything we do, we
do from our trunk; our legs our arms are moving off of our trunk and we want to have a stable
core. The neutral position for the spine is an S ing curve and it’s slight inward curve
at the cervical spine and the lumbar spine and a slight outward curve at our thoracic
spine. This allows us to keep the entire spine in what we call its neutral position. And
from this position, we want to stabilize it and move with it always in this position.
When we look at the spine, we also want to look at the fact that it’s connected to
the pelvis. The pelvis is like a bowl, and we want to keep that bowl in an upright position,
so when we’re standing or sitting, we’re on our sit bones, the ones that you see right
here and that tilts the pelvis slightly forward and in doing that we’re able to maintain
that neutral spine. If I rotate that pelvis back, something that people frequently do
when sitting in a chair is let that pelvis roll back, we immediately lose that neutral
spine. So we want to keep that pelvis upright and forward, with lumbar support to hold it
in that position so that we can maintain the neutral spine. This has been an overview of
proper posture and a healthy spine.
