The 15 Minute Rule

“If you keep making that face it’ll stay that way.”

Maybe Mom was more correct than she knew.

From a health standpoint, I think posture may be the most ignored component of them all (okay, maybe diet ranks up there too).

Poor posture limits your ability to breathe (not like that's important, right?), promotes overuse injuries, creates muscle imbalances, and results in back pain just to name a few.

Without an ongoing awareness of your posture on a daily basis, you can expect it progressively adapt to whatever shape you spend most of your time in. For instance, if you sit all day at a computer, you can expect to be shaped like the chair you sit in with a rounded back, rounded shoulders, and a forward head position.

Pretty, huh?

The processes that cause this progressive and undesirable adaptation in our posture are called stress-relaxation and creep.

Stress-relaxation is a progressive decline in the natural tension that tissues produce when placed under tension. When the tissues are held under constant tension for a long enough time, they begin to deform and elongate. This called creep. This becomes a relatively permanent elongation unless the tension is removed from the tissues before creep occurs.

You see gravity works.

It pulls down on you all day and as you relax your muscles and the tissues are exposed to that pull of gravity, stress-relaxation and creep will occur within about 10-20 minutes if you don’t change position.

Your strategy to overcome this is the 15 Minute Rule.

Every 15 minutes to need to make an active postural correction and even better, change positions entirely. For instance, if you’ve been sitting, stand. If you’ve been slouching, sit as tall as possible. You may also want to perform some corrective stretching for about 15 seconds on key muscle groups that are prone to shortening.

Most common are the muscles that internally rotate the shoulders (pecs, lats, subscapularis), downwardly rotate your shoulder blades (levator scapulae, rhomboids), and flex the knee and the hip (TFL, psoas, iliacus, rectus femoris, and hamstrings).

The 15 Minute Rule is so important that when we designed our upper body performance training video Inside-Out we felt it imperative to include daily postural correction strategies that lead to upper extremity injuries and declines in performance.

So I guess Mom WAS right in a sense…and, uh, eat your vegetables.

Later

P.S. My good buddy Mike Robertson gave me the following little tidbit of information. In Microsoft Outlook you can set an alarm to go off every 15 minutes to remind you to correct your posture. If you don’t use Outlook, go to Wal-Mart and buy a $20 watch with a count down timer on it and set it for 15 minutes.