Following on from the revelation that sitting is now a health hazard, I mentioned last week that standing can also be subjective. How you stand is relative to your health too.

We are going to look at a checklist to help you stand better. That means that the arrangement of the body uses greater muscle force to keep you in place, while decreasing the loads on the foot arches, knee ligaments and lower back associated with long term body damage. This is also relevant to those who have standing jobs in shops, for example.

By checking these six steps you will be rearranging the alignment markers which make for better whole body use, while standing at your workstation.

Step 1 – Feet forward

Align the outside edges of your feet with a straight edge, such as a book or the edge of a mat. When standing still, this position optimises the leverage of the foot’s arch, thereby making muscles in the feet and hips. Later it will become apparent how to rotate the thighs, however, that can’t be carried out unless the feet are ‘neutral’.

When you lift your chest your spine comes along too

As you will be on your feet for a long time, you will want the muscles supporting your structure to be fully active. In most people the lower leg turns out as a result of excessive sitting and the type of footwear used while growing up.

Step 2 – Legs vertical

Your pelvis (which contains the centre of mass while standing) should be back over the heels, instead of out over the front of the feet. When looking at yourself from the side, your hip joint, knee joint and ankle joint should all stack up in vertical alignment. The soft tissues in the middle of the foot cannot bear the weight as well as the giant heel bone in the rear foot.

Standing with the pelvis out in front of the foot puts unnecessary load on the quadriceps (muscles up the front of the thigh) and psoas muscles (centrally located muscle on either side of the lumbar spine), which, in turn, puts unnecessary strain on the knees.

Step 3 – Feet pelvis-width apart

Place the ankles the width of your pelvis apart. The hipbones should be directly over the centre of your ankles. If the feet are closer together, or further apart, there is a creation of particular loads on the knees that are associated with knee degeneration. Keeping the ankles at the correct width allows you to hold yourself up with the major muscle groups that do the job well, rather than relying on passive structures such as ligaments.

Step 4 – Pelvis neutral

The pelvis is made up of the anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS), often referred to as the hipbones. The pubic symphysis (PS) is the midline joint where the two hipbones come together at the front of the body.  It is the lowest bony prominence before your pelvis wraps around to the undercarriage.

Align your ASIS and PS vertically. The pelvis sets the stage for the spine. Your spine cannot sit optimally relative to gravitational forces, unless the pelvis allows it to do so. Alignment of the pelvis is important when you are standing all day long because the integrity of the spine (vertebrae, discs and spinal ligaments) depends on it. Also important are the abdominal muscles, they have to be able to generate force to keep you upright – hence the need to strengthen your core.

Step 5 – Ribs down

After aligning the pelvis, place the hands on the waist, then slide the hands up so they encircle your ribcage. With each hand, feel for the lowest part of your rib in the front of your body and drop those protrusions (each side being its own point) until the front part of the lowest rib is stacked vertically over the front of the pelvis. The ribs should sink right into the abdominal flesh.

The spine is connected to the ribs, so when you thrust or lift your chest your spine comes along too. You can’t have a neutral spine without first having a neutral ribcage. When you lift and jut your chest out, you are actually shearing some of the vertebrae in your lower back and forcing the vertebrae in your neck to adjust unnaturally too.

Step 6 – Kneecap release

The position of your kneecaps is not fixed but subject to the pattern of muscle tension in your thigh muscles (quads). Balanced standing does not require constant tension in the front of the thigh. This means that the kneecaps are locked into a knee-pit-neutral ‘pulled up’ position, then your quads are doing much of the work.

Drop them by anchoring your weight back into your heels, thereby turning off the gripping motion in the quads.  Having ‘locked knees’ is a leg position that subjects the body to ‘blood flow altering configurations’ – either hyperextension or constant tension in the quad muscles.

For more information on how to hold your body upright, read Don’t Just Sit There by Katy Bowman (Lotus Publishing, 2016), available from Amazon.

kathrynmborg@yahoo.com