Years of posture compromising positions will leave their imprint on our musculo-skeletal system in the form of various postural deviations. The dangling head, the large bump at the base of the neck, the humped back, drooping shoulders, protruding shoulder blades, curved spine, protruding tummy and fanny, inward/outward facing knees, flat feet etc. are all telltale signs of joints being where they shouldn’t be.
Re-aligning these various deviations back to the their proper location relative to the rest of the body is the first goal of your structural realignment program.
Initially the body is placed into a number of realigning poses either on the floor, or against the wall and under the gentle, pulling effect of gravity, permitted to slowly adjust to being in an aligned position . The flat surfaces of the floor and wall provide a plane of reference toward which the body will begin to adjust itself.
Gravity provides the corrective force, gently drawing the muscles, tendons, and ligaments back into their proper positions. No manual manipulation is applied or necessary. These positions are so restorative that after just a few minutes, most clients feel that their pain has greatly diminished if not entirely stopped. Even decade old chronic problems have often disappeared within minutes, once the body has reassumed its proper postural positioning.
Once the body has started reassuming the proper posture by means of realignment poses against the floor or wall, fixating exercises are now added to the routine to train the responsible muscle groups to maintain this proper alignment.
The goal is not to simply relax, loosen, or strengthen muscles, but rather to realign the balanced functioning of the postural muscles around the joint. Since, postural muscles are targeted, these fixating exercises do not involve the typical sweaty, weight-room style of workouts involved in building up the outer layers of dynamic, load-bearing muscles. These personalized programs are easily understood and executed and can be performed at home without a lot of external devices.
After formulating your personalized program your physical therapist will then coach you through the entire program. As you execute the various poses and functional demand excercises your physical therapist will closely observe you and continue to customize your program. Your program will thus provide your postural muscles with the maximum stimulus while still remaining within the limits of reasonable comfort. A number of times throughout your program, your physical therapist will want to evaluate your posture to monitor your progress. Though not in every case, obvious results can often be noted after performing even a few exercises. Since
the newly reactivated postural muscles will quickly tire out again, the initial results will last only a few hours. Never-the-less, such obvious and immediate responses are a good indication of the effectiveness of your SRT Program and that lasting results will soon follow.
In conclusion, you will be given a personalized folder containing illustrations of all the positions and exercises in your SRT Program and the entire program will be thoroughly reviewed. A typical visit to the clinic requires an hour .
Your personal SRT Program will take between 30-40 minutes to execute and needs to be done once a day to be truly effective. Since the positions and exercises build on top of each other, their prescribed order should be followed and you should try to arrange your schedule so that you can execute the entire program during the course of one workout, rather than chopping the program up into sections.
After two weeks of performing your daily routine, you will observe that the program is becoming noticeably easier. Some exercises may still be challenging, but even the harder ones are becoming easier.
You should also start noticing changes in the intensity or duration of your pain, your ease of motion, levels of strength, energy, etc. Whether your symptoms have started responding or not, by all means your postural muscles are still in acute need of further realignment and strengthening. This is why we ask you to return to the clinic for a new evaluation. Your therapist will want to observe which deviations have responded and by how much. You will then be prescribed a new Joint Static Program, replacing your previous program and providing you with an increased level of postural stimulus. Similarly to the first visit, this program will be practiced together, thoroughly explained and illustrated so that it can be easily carried out at home.
Since deviations compound on top of each other, the general order of pain elimination generally starts with the lower back and hip area problems being resolved first. Joint problems then tend to become resolved sequentially upward and downward from there. Being the furthest from the hip, wrist, fingers, ankle, toes problems may take longer than other joints, as might decades old, chronically stiff joints, that are so misaligned that they have become literally locked into place.
We must always remember, however, that the bones do what the muscles tell them to do and under repeated stimulation even these muscles can be taught to assume their original functions and under daily stimulation they will start moving their assigned bones the way they were supposed to.
Since in the real world, dead-lines, injury, travel, etc. tend to disrupt all our schedules, you will probably be forced to skip the occasional day or two, but your program will continue to be effective, despite these occasional lapses. In encouragement, however, many have found that the 30 minute time investment, even during the longest periods of work blitzes or most disruptive schedules on the road, paid itself back many times over in the form of increased comfort and productivity.
For those who want to progress especially quickly, your SRT Program can be done several times throughout the day. Those who can do their program only once every two days will also experience steady progress. Although anything is better than nothing, doing the program less than every two days, however, leads to greatly diminishing returns. The bottom line is that the rate of your progress will be directly determined by the amount of stimulus you provide to your postural muscles. The key is to make a 30 minute/day-3 month commitment to restore your musculo-skeletal system and start experiencing personally the results. Once you start feeling and
seeing the results, you will become even more motivated to continue your program.
You can now wake up refreshed, be active from early morning until late at night, and then enjoy a good nights rest because the inner postural muscles have been restored to maintain proper alignment under loading 24 hours a day. This is not wishful thinking, but the way your body was actually designed to function. Such a condition of health is not just what you should be wishing for, but expecting. It is totally within your power to accomplish via totally realistic means. The physiological know-how now exists to help you eliminate joint pain from your life. So the most important factor is not weight, age, or lifestyle, but rather your desire to live as full a life as possible.
Your personal SRT Program will equip you with the most effective method of postural restoration available within the shortest period of time and the least amount of effort.
We encourage you to take advantage of our Joint Alignment Evaluation offer to help you determine your present level of joint health, the causes of your problematic joint symptoms, and what can be done to correct them.