My mother was a beautiful woman, marred only – as she aged – by an increasingly curving back. Into their 90s, her older sister constantly berated her, telling her to stand up straight. But she didn’t. And, seeing how it looked, I resolved that wouldn’t happen to me.
But it has. And lately it’s been my daughters suggesting that I should straighten my back. Which I’ve tried to do, especially as the mirror doesn’t lie, and I could see for myself that I have a problem. But its magnitude only hit me recently, when someone took a series of photos, some of which were a back view of me. Not pretty!
It drove me to google the possibility that there might be such a thing as a posture physiotherapist. And lo and behold, not only is there such a thing, but there turned out to be a clinic full of them in the next suburb to ours. I made an appointment immediately.
And I’m now armed with the instruction to aim to always walk tall, augmented by a battery of exercises, which I tried out in the clinic, and was given a series of hand-drawn diagrams and scribbled notes to follow at home. Unfortunately, about half of them ended up being only half remembered, and the notes about them were somewhat ambiguous.
So, I went on Youtube to see if they were demonstrated in any videos. While there were quite a few posture exercise videos, none were what I was supposed to do. So, I emailed my new physiotherapist in case he had any videos of my problem exercises. He had, and sent them back immediately. Extremely helpful!
So now, I’m three days into working on reversing my curve. I see him again in three weeks, and will report back in Part 2, on how much change has happened by then. Meanwhile, I like the fact that it’s never too late to work on making our bodies better, and that with modern technology it’s not hard to find resources that can help us to do that.
Anne Ring ©2020
Photo: Willowpix via iStock
Go Mum! I think I’ll jump on your bandwagon now too.
Fiona (46)