Physiotherapy

Its not rocket science, we all know that posture is an important part of physiotherapy, but it is too often neglected when treating a problem.

Not at HFS. Our Physiotherapists realise that re-training muscle function is largely a waste of time if you don’t start by first correcting a patient’s postural alignment.

Adverse postures leads to sustained loading of joints, ligaments, muscles, and other musculoskeletal tissues which overtime causes these tissues to become overloaded, irritated, and painful.

Our tissues also deform (‘stretch out’) significantly when we sustain loads on them, so prolonged adverse postures can lead to irreversible loss of tissue stiffness. Stiffness is often thought of as a bad thing, which if excessive it certainly is, but our tissues do need some amount of ‘stiffness’ to hold our body parts together and to stop joints from moving too far.

Posture needs to be assessed both statically (sitting, standing…), but also dynamically, for example when walking and running. Often people walk / run with a postural alignment that inhibits muscles around the low back / pelvis region from working efficiently, resulting in abnormal pelvis mechanics and associated low back, pelvis, hip, and knee problems.

Correction of posture involves learning the specific movement(s) to correct alignment of the body, and persistence! Further rehabilitation is then carried out from this corrected alignment.

Ergonomic Assessment may also be required to identify and correct any barriers to sitting correctly that may exist, e.g. seating, workstation setup. It is much easier to sit with good posture when the workstation and chair setup encourage it.